An IRA surveillance operation suggests terrorism may turn out to be the main focus, with perhaps a connection to Middle East tensions and the PLO. An office intrigue starts up, bringing the subject of sexual politics into play (the pervasive condescension of men towards women in that not-so-long-ago era is reconstructed with painful accuracy).
But no: Canning dumps Serena with sudden and (to her) inexplicable cruelty, disappearing out of the story for a long time, and as Serena takes up her career at MI5 other themes emerge. We seem to be heading for a story of civilisation versus barbarism the "seedy, careless insurrection" (as Serena puts it) of the 70s played off against the self-sacrificing heroism of the second world war generation, with Canning's mystery somewhere at the centre. He refines her cold-warrior instincts with heavy doses of Churchill, and disciplines her patriotism with an informed sense of England's glorious past. A history tutor at Cambridge – an older man named Canning, who has a mysterious scar – recruits her, first as his mistress, then as a spy for MI5. In the post-60s England of strikes, bomb blasts, oil crises, cold war escalation, ideological grandstanding and generally impending anarchy, old-fashioned Serena reads Solzhenitsyn and pledges herself against the evils of communism. Almost a hundred pages pass before we discover the precise nature of this mission a more leisurely prelude than usual, but just as mesmerising as its predecessors, with every page adding some new hint that deepens or adjusts our sense of what is going to be at stake in Serena's story. We learn in the first paragraph that she was sent on a secret mission 40 years ago, and that it ended badly for her and her lover.
Set mostly in London during the early 70s, it is told (in hindsight from the present day) by Serena Frome, a bishop's daughter brought up in the genteel "walled garden" of a cathedral precinct. The new novel, Sweet Tooth, is no exception.
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