Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I used to watch Monty Python when I was a kid, and I loved the silliness. But I must have missed out on a fair amount of the actual humor, knowing nearly nothing about the British other than that they talked different and sometimes ate boiled foods. I had no sense whatsoever of how important class was in England, how more deeply intimate they were with their history, how closely they watched, participated in, and were effected by daily politics. And Monty Python skewered all of that.
I know now more than I did then, but a lot of still goes over my head. Which is why I’m sure I didn’t get everything out of Sweet Tooth that I could have. I may better appreciation of the English approach to class, but I’ve never really lived it. I know a little more history than I used to, but not nearly enough to understand the significance of IRA activities in the early seventies, the prime ministries of Wilson and Heath (and Wilson), or the dance and squabble that defined a cold-war MI6 and MI5.
Which is too bad for me, considering how wonderfully constructed McEwan’s novel is. Here are stories within stories, history finding a way to repeat itself, or at least to be an extended metaphor of itself, an allegory for itself. There’s foreshadowing aplenty, but he pulls the reader in so thoroughly that the foreshadowing is subtle, only recognized when characters cast back to the beginning to find answers for their present.
It’s this kind of expertise that lends me to believe everything is essential; I didn’t understand all of the politics and history he’s describing, but I assume it’s part and parcel of the deliberate construct. Which is my way of saying: McEwan writes with the kind of consistency that lends a reader to completely trusting him.
And therefor, when I got to the end, and the “twist” (that’s actual not a good word for it, but I don’t want to give anything away, or give anything away by saying that there’s something to give away that I am hiding—trust me, “twist” describes nothing and you’ll understand when you’ve finished the book) it was actually very easy to go along with it; indeed, it was a very satisfying end to a novel that had a rather dismal trajectory (in terms of the hero’s triumph, you know, a trope that we enjoy with enthusiasm even if we don’t admit it out loud in this too-modern age).
When I was a kid and I would read academic treatments of Monty Python, I thought they were just a lot of self-indulgent hot air. Now I understand, a little better, that apparent silliness can have deep roots in social commentary (thus: satire). And for what it’s worth, most academic treatments ARE a lot of self-indulgent hot air, as are most book reviews, but at least we can appreciate that something wonderful has been created, even if we can always know exactly what it is.