McEwan, Ian. Sweet tooth, Jonathan Cape , London, 2012. (Pages 320, paperback)

Rating: 3/10

Ian McEwan is capable of writing excellent books as shown by his Atonement, On Chesil Beach and Saturday. Sweet tooth, though, is a dull execution of what would normally be a readable premise.

You have a good-looking, decent but promiscuous (judging by her actions) young girl joining the British spy agency MI5. In the cold war days of the 70s, she is part of a project where the British intelligence would clandestinely sponsor writing talents so as to propagate through their words the goodness of capitalism and evils of communism.

We know how incompetent most spy agencies are in real world. But in this book MI5 comes across as a particularly daft one. The project of recruiting unknown writers and paying them handsomely, and to recruit special staff to select such writers sounds far-fetched, unconvincing and bizarre. McEwan simply uses the story to write a book about writing, and in many places goes autobiographical by including his own stories from the past. Sweet tooth like Arabian nights contains many stories. But unlike Arabian nights, they are not related to the book theme, nor are they readable. One exception: for mathematically minded readers, the Monty Hall paradox is used cleverly and is amusing.

To write a spy novel of three hundred pages where nothing really happens except a young woman becoming fond of older men, getting overwhelmed by them, and then sharing with the reader the unexciting writing of one of those men; is a wasted literary effort.

To be fair to McEwan, in the final fifty pages the quality picks up, the words become readable and acquire meaning, and some of the book’s defects get explained. Unfortunately, the reader must trudge through more than two hundred and fifty pages to reach this ending. I don’t think the modern reader is so patient.

Verdict: A failed experiment in metafiction. I hope this is simply an off-form book by Ian McEwan, rather than a permanent decline. He is among the best British writers.