It's at about this point – admittedly a full third of the way through the novel – that McEwan really starts to have fun, and, as long as you can see through the somewhat dreary, understated, Tinker Tailor-ishness of the spying game, so do you.
isn't afraid to talk publicly about writers in prison in Castro's Cuba" but that they're emphatically "not interested in the decline of the West, or down with progress or any other modish pessimism". And, meanwhile, the men upstairs take care to stress that what they're looking for is "the sort who might spare a moment for his hard-pressed fellows in the Eastern bloc. But the recipient must never know where the money is coming from. A struggling novelist's dream, in other words.Ĭodenamed Sweet Tooth, this is MI5's way of covertly recruiting writers and journalists to bang the drum for its own causes.
She is to immerse herself in the work of a young novelist called TH Haley, then meet him and assess whether or not he should be offered the chance of a stipend – "enough to keep a chap from having to do a day job for a year or two, even three". Happy to let them think she's "in with the scene", Serena accepts an exciting mission. yes, awfully well read and quite in with the scene.'" She starts working for MI5 anyway but is disappointed to find herself doing mere grunt work as junior assistant officer in a "grubby little office" in Curzon Street.Ĭontinuing in her spare time to work her way through the cream of contemporary fiction (in paperback: she can't afford hardbacks) she's startled to find herself summoned upstairs to face a roomful of men: "'We understand… you're rather well up on modern writing – literature, novels, that sort of thing – bang up to date on, what's the word… contemporary literature. When the professor dumps her – literally in a layby off the A45 – she is devastated.
At Cambridge she falls, in an equally dutiful, quasi-somnambulant way, into an affair with a much older, much married history professor and finds herself being groomed for an interview with MI5. A speed-reader of novels, she toys at first with an English degree but is persuaded by her mother that it's her "duty as a woman" to grapple instead with numbers.
Serena Frome – blond, "rather gorgeous" and "rhymes with plume" – graduates with a third in maths.
0 kommentar(er)
