McEwan he had the eminent Tom Maschler as an editor and got to know Martin Amis and Ian Hamilton. McEwan he got a degree in English at the University of Sussex. She’s soon in bed with him, and the more she grows to like him, the more doubts she has about coming clean about her MI5 mission.Īs for Tom Haley, he has a lot in common with the author of this novel. She doesn’t like tricks, she says, she “liked life as I knew it recreated on the page.” And after reading Tom’s stories she immediately tries to draw connections between the author and his heroes. Serena is the sort of reader who likes her fictions straight. The writer Serena is sent to target is a young man named Tom Haley, who has published some short stories and some journalism, and who is in need of a stipend to continue his work. Eventually, she is asked to take part in an operation code-named “Sweet Tooth,” which involves using a phony foundation to cultivate writers who might promote an anti-Marxist, pro-West perspective in articles or speeches. She wanted to live up to Tony’s expectations - in this she resembles many le Carré characters, who are eager to please and who find it alarmingly easy to lie - and she soon finds herself with an entry-level job at the intelligence service.
She also emerges as a highly unprofessional employee who thinks little of endangering her first big mission - never mind the reputation of the intelligence service - by getting romantically involved with the very subject of her assignment.Īs Serena tells it, she was recruited for MI5 in 1972 by one Tony Canning, the married, middle-aged history tutor she was seeing while she was a student at Cambridge. In this case Serena comes across as a smug, narcissistic young thing who had no scruples about bouncing from one lover to another while using or deceiving them with cavalier aplomb. McEwan has demonstrated a gift for portraying disagreeable characters with psychological precision: the pair of conniving and self-deluding opportunists in “Amsterdam,” the children who bury their mother in the basement in “The Cement Garden,” the 13-year-old girl in “Atonement” who tells a monstrous lie that will send her sister’s boyfriend to jail and shatter the family’s sheltered existence.
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