Ian McEwan's new novel about the spy milieu and literature

(Sladokusac - Sweet Tooth; Ian McEwan; Jonathan Cape, London, 2013)

During the Second World War, "Minced Meat" was one of those operations that could probably guarantee success because of the way it was created.

Most readers may be familiar with the term "the man who never existed", according to which a book of the same name was created after the war, and even a film, about the corpse of a Welsh homeless man who was decorated with the rank of major by the British intelligence service and thrown into the sea near Spain, would it not indicate the Axis powers to the thought that the invasion of southern Europe would definitely start from the Iberian Peninsula.

Instead, the Allies, starting from North Africa, landed on poorly defended Sicily. It is a true story.

The idea for such a detailed plan was taken from the unknown crime story The Milliner's Hat Mystery, from 1937. The young naval commander who observed similar events in the aforementioned novel would become a famous writer after the war.

Even the epigraph of McEwan's book tells how the Cold War abounded with careless and petty people

It is about Ian Fleming, the creator of Agent 007; he joined the idea with others in a memorandum read before a secret committee chaired by an Oxford don, himself a writer of detective novels.

Finding an identity, creating a convincing background out of nothing, thus injecting a plausible life into an ordinary corpse could be said to have been done in true novelistic fashion.

And not only that; the naval attaché who arranged for the drowned major to be found in Spain was also a novelist. Operation Mincemeat succeeded because of innovation; she was literally pulling the intelligence net in the right direction so that proper work would not be done.

Back to the Cold War

In comparison, Operation Sweetheart presented in Ian McEwan's latest, fifteenth novel, is the diametric opposite of Mincemeat, not only because it takes place in an economically pathetic and politically tumultuous period in Britain, but because the intelligence service simply decided to entangles in his own creation.

As McEwan's hero, Tom Hadley, explains in the final chapter: "Our moment of glory happened thirty years ago. In our own downfall, we live in the shadows of giants."

In other words, in an all-out war, the motives should never have been directed by the bureaucracy. Otherwise, the covert operation and all its actors would be called into question. Honestly, Sweetheart is a fairly trivial operation that's also sloppily run, and it's great that it's that way.

Although blurred at first glance, things are actually not as complicated as they may seem. Or are they?

But even before it started, we will learn that the real writer, Angus Wilson (The Old Men in the Zoo) - in the early 1970s he was the director of the English Arts Council and had connections in wartime intelligence circles - told MI5 to immediately forget about something so banal.

Even the epigraph of McEwan's book talks about how the Cold War abounded with careless and petty people, who in principle were not even unbearably evil, as in the novels of Ian Fleming.

Like the Cold War itself, at first sight nothing is as it seems in McEwan's novel. Although Sweetheart advertises itself as a spy (similar to the author's 1990 title, The Innocent), it is primarily a romance novel that hypertrophies about the jealousy and carelessness of the Brave New World.

But it also talks about fiction and the ways in which books and writing can affect people. After all, the genre doesn't even matter, but the man - like any good British writer - is impressed to try his hand at "spy" waters at least once in his career. After all, it is a male genre.

And the crucial turn in the final, epistolary, chapter will make us think: what should happen now? That is, it will make us think back to the previous parts of the book in order to literally calculate whether the main character really made the right decision or not. So it is better to say that the solution lies in the entire novel, not just in the last chapter.

The fall of the empire

Although blurred at first glance, things are actually not as complicated as they may seem. Or are they? Even McEwan stated that it does not matter at all that Le Carre's Tailor, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Euro-Giunti, Belgrade, 2012) belongs to the so-called to the spy genre when the novel is exceptional; he first received a blessing from Le Carre on this topic, and at the end of the book he expressed gratitude to him for the "irresistible reminiscences" of the great writer.

The same criticism can be directed at Sweets, McEwan's most significant (and certainly least dark) title after Redemption from 2001 (Paideia, Belgrade) - with which it shares a good part of the connective tissue.

In this case, McEwan places the downfall in the early 1970s during the shaky government of Sir Edward Heath

So McEwan wrote a non-dark Cold War novel? Non-dark in what sense? A universal theme that attracts the more free-spirited Islanders is the apparent demise of the British Empire.

However, the so-called downfall, judging at least from what we come across in the literature, has been going on for a whole century, if not longer; you can place its beginnings in America, during the Revolution; better still, you can move it to India, to the colonial chaos of the 18th century, and then, if you like, to the very heart of Victorian England, where the term Christian God began to die out with the apparent evolution of the scientific and cultural establishment.

After all, McEwan has already played with "doom", in Atonement describing the confused events of Dunkirk in 1940 with wonderful, sick detail.

In this case, McEwan places the downfall in the early 1970s during Sir Edward Heath's shaky government and constant strikes, fuel and electricity shortages, and new waves of trouble with Ireland. The character of politicians is as important as the ideals for which these people supposedly stand.

In Heath's case, this could not be more true, considering that he rejected the ideal strategy and policy, which he sincerely pursued in 1970, as soon as he encountered the first difficulties. The crisis is also rocking Britain's intelligence service, the MI5 (Homeland Security Service) and MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) sections.

Allegedly, before his death, Orwell gave the government the addresses of 38 former pro-communist writers from Eastern Europe

Even so, the British find enough funds to launch Operation Sweetheart. They do it in order to subconsciously impress and overpower the CIA, then the richest service in the world; The CIA secretly financed the development of anti-communist ideas around the world through the famous Congress for Cultural Freedom, which caused a kind of scandal.

In the same way, the New York Times exposed in 1966 that the same spy organization also finances the well-known British cultural magazine Encounter, until similar organizations in other countries began to be viewed with suspicion.

With similar tactics, the British service would spread its voice throughout Eastern Europe despite the fact that, as I have already stated, Angus Wilson advised them that it was a painstaking job that could not even dream of guaranteeing results. This time the British have no intention of faltering; their institution "International Freedom" will not be exposed by anyone.

Writing or service?

So, financing local writers with a pronounced anti-communist attitude would certainly lead to contacts with authors of similar sensibilities in communist countries. In Cold War culture, this is known as "hand to hand."

Allegedly, before his death, Orwell handed over to the government the addresses of 38 former pro-communist writers from Eastern Europe, who over time realized that the West was still the cultural center of the world. This kind of logic can only have a favorable outlook in theory, because English authors must not know at all that they are being financed by the British government. And that is all.

It is important to approach a talented man, to convince him that the "cultural organization" is delighted with his work and to give him enough money so that in the next few years he will only write and not think about anything else. For one writer, this is called the perfect retirement.

Enter Serena Frum, the very attractive narrator of the novel, who enrolled at Cambridge because of her mathematical gift, in which her mother obviously believed without precedent, and which is why she graduated with the lowest average. However, Serena is more interested in fiction, which she reads with ease, regardless of genre.

After an ill-fated affair with an older gentleman from the teaching profession and connections in the intelligence service, Serena gets a job in the civil service at MI5, and a few months later, thanks to her reading, the simple task of reading the works of a certain assistant at the University of Sussex, Tom Headley; then he needs to determine if Hadley would be suitable for their operation and then win him over with a monetary offer, with which the Institution for which Frumova works would finance his first novel.

Sladokusac is in every sense a fantastically sedative and, above all, a competent performance by an author

Although Headley possesses an anti-communist sensibility in occasional essays on neglected artists behind the Iron Curtain, his stories are entirely different, relying on highlighting the flaws that exist in everyday English life.

Several of these stories, otherwise very similar to McEwan's from the second collection of short stories, In Between Sheets (1978), will be experienced not in their entirety but through the poetic recounting of a chirping narrator, which will make us care about the protagonist long before the man even appears. on paper.

With Serena, things are a little different, since she, in her eternal search for a stable relationship, already sees herself falling in love with Hadley, a man with a considerable talent for fiction.

Assuming that McEwan's title is one of the first novels with the cultural Cold War as its theme, I would rather write that Sweetheart speaks more about literature (like McEwan's duplicitous Redemption) and the author's manipulative self-referentiality, than about the espionage industry.

If you end up expecting a fantastical bureaucratic, political monolith like Mailer's probably best, Harlot's Ghost (1991), about the broad architecture of the Secret Service in the form of another fictional autobiography of a hardened agent, then McEwan's authentic, subtle pages will leave you feeling like you've wandered into quite a different world, where espionage operations are not led by polished and experienced mandarins but by unrefined emotions.

Sladokusac is in every sense a fantastically sedative and, above all, a competent performance by an author who simply enjoys the power and reach of his own sense of strong and plausible prose.