In ‘Sweet Tooth,’ Mcewan’s spy likes it hot

With ending in hand, reader may find plot, characters annoying.

Ian McEwan’s coy novel, “Sweet Tooth,” begins with an intriguing confession from the narrator: “My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost 40 years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. I didn’t return safely. Within 18 months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing.”

So we start off knowing how Serena’s story will end. The mystery, it would appear, has to do only with the details of her mission, the identity of her lover and the nature of her undoing. But what begins as a sort of Cold War le Carre tale about a spy (and the psychology of spying) soon mutates into something else: a tricky postmodern entertainment that features, in the role of Serena’s lover, a writer who bears more than passing resemblance to the younger McEwan himself.

The result is a clever but annoying novel that lacks the deeply felt emotion of this author’s dazzling 2001 masterpiece, “Atonement,” and the chilling exactitude of his 1998 Booker Prize-winning thriller, “Amsterdam.”

About halfway through, readers may begin to suspect what the story’s concluding twist might be, and when we reach the end, we realize the puzzle pieces McEwan has carved don’t quite come together with the sort of authoritative click that might have made for a fully satisfying novel.

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. She also emerges as a highly unprofessional employee who thinks little of endangering her first big mission — code-named “Sweet Tooth” — by getting romantically involved with the very subject of her assignment.

McEwan seems to want to make the reader think about the lines between life and art, and the similarities between spying and writing. He also seems to want to make us reconsider the assumptions we make when we read a work of fiction. As usual, his prose is effortlessly seductive. And he does a nimble job, too, of conjuring London in the 1970s — with its economic woes, worries about IRA bombings and uneasy assimilation of the countercultural changes of the ’60s. These aspects of “Sweet Tooth” keep the reader trucking on through the novel, but alas they’re insufficient compensation for the story’s selfconscious contrivance and foreseeable conclusion.