Sweet Tooth

“Wasn’t it right that England should have set itself apart to struggle against the Catholic despotisms on the Continent?”

Tony is an important figure in Serena’s life, not just as a lover but as a teacher. He is a history lecturer at Cambridge, but also someone embroiled in the world of intelligence. Tony represents the fine line between history and ideology, and frequently and deliberately blurs this line. The lessons he gives to Serena are as much ideological lessons as they are history lectures, as Tony is grooming Serena to be a tool of the state. He is not just teaching her about history, but how to interpret history in such a way that will be useful to the world of British intelligence.

“The word ‘adult’ was everywhere in red neon.”

Serena walks through Soho at a difficult point in her life. She feels childish and her surroundings begin to echo her sentiments. The seedy underbelly of London reminds Serena how young and inexperienced she really is, bluntly flashing the word “adult” across the facades of businesses which she dares not enter, lit up in a dangerous, piercing red color. For all the time Serena spent with an older man over the course of the summer, she has not gained Tony’s maturity and experience.

“Just that, a mundane domestic instruction, and then he continued with his line of thought.”

Serena recalls the incident which caused her breakup from Tony and recasts the memory as a deliberate action on his behalf to spare her the emotional turmoil. She has no way to confirm whether this suspicion is true, yet she projects it onto the memory of Tony to alleviate her pain. Just as intelligence agencies create fake personalities and cover stories to protect their agents, Serena devises a complicated story to protect her happy memories of the past. Tony’s influence is shown in the way Serena has already begun to use the tricks of the intelligence services without really realizing that she is doing so.

“And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favorite old shoes.”

Serena loves books because they provide her with escapism from her previously dull life. She grew up in a solidly middle class, uninteresting household. Thanks to literature, she could inhabit many other lives. This escapism becomes a foreshadowing of her work for MI5. When meeting with Haley, for example, she slips into a new personality. She inhabits her cover story as she inhabits the lives of the protagonists in the books she reads.

“Someone had been intensively interrogated. Those Registry files were connected to real fates.”

As she familiarizes herself with working at MI5, Serena folds her new life into her old one. She has always been a keen reader, so she pours through the files about undercover agents with relish. However, these files are as different as they are connected to the lives of real people. While this horrifies Shirley, Serena is intrigued because the words she reads finally have real emotional weight. The real-world implications of her new reading material only add intrigue to her new job.

“Reality isn’t always middle class.”

Shirley tells Serena that reality is far removed from her middle-class experiences, but the words are not necessarily true. As Serena grows into her role at MI5, she discovers that everything around her is solidly middle class. The intelligence services create their own form of reality, whether they are devising fake identities or funding writers in a secret manner. The organization and everyone who works there is entirely invested in this unreal reality. Shirley is correct that reality is not always so middle class, but that means nothing in terms of the fake reality which the employees of MI5 routinely inhabit.

“I was a girl who liked to be praised.”

Serena has a malleable personality and is always in search of praise. She is willing to change parts of herself in pursuit of positive reinforcement, which makes her a good fit for working as an undercover agent for MI5. When she meets with Haley, she seeks his praise just as she sought praise from her father, from Tony, and from her superiors. Given the emptiness of her childhood, her entire adult life is spent seeking validation from other people to justify the decision she has made, or the decisions which she has allowed other people to make on her behalf.

“I felt closer to Tom Haley than I would if he’d been a colleague in the Registry these past nine months.”

Reading Haley’s short stories brings him closer to Serena. While everyone at MI5 is self-aware of how they are being monitored and evaluated on a constant basis, the short stories provide a direct line into Haley’s raw, unfiltered thought patterns. His words are unguarded and open, the opposite of everyone working in the intelligence organization. After months in the vicinity of such closely-guarded people, Serena finally feels as though she understands someone, even if her relationship with Haley is currently entirely unilateral. She creates a version of him in her mind based entirely on his stories because she is lonely and desperate for real, unaffected human interaction.

“I also felt vulnerable to Neil Carder’s loose grip on reality. It could loosen my own.”

paranoia becomes her paranoia, made worse by her sense that she is being watched by the people from MI5. Serena’s grip on reality is weakening, but she is at least self-aware of the way in which her mind is being affected by her circumstances and her love of literature.

“To oppose the system is to be criminally insane.”

Max is a scathing critic of the Soviet communist system, though he is sympathetic to the people who live within it. However, his critiques of the Soviet system can also function as critiques of MI5. As demonstrated by Serena’s work, anyone who professes any interest in systems other than western capitalism is closely monitored and barred from entry into certain jobs. A schoolteacher who attends one meeting of the Communist Party will be a marked man for the rest of his life. While he will not be declared insane, his fleeting commitment to the state will be noted and punished. As in the Soviet Union, opposition to the governing system is not permitted, though the way this manifests is different. Soviet critics are declared insane, while western critics are essentially exiled from public life.

“Then Haley should have let the reader know.”

Max does not appreciate Haley’s writing. He is completely immune to metaphor or poetic license, being unable to interpret or appreciate the more figurative aspects of fiction. His dedication to bureaucracy is such that he cannot approve of anything which is not clearly labelled and explicit. Max is the typical intelligence operative, so his distaste for fiction mirrors the intelligence agency’s distaste for anything they cannot control.

“I became uneasy whenever one of his male characters became intimate with a woman, with another woman.”

Serena falls in love with Haley’s writing before she falls in love with Haley, though one precedes the other. She becomes acquainted with him vicariously through his characters, to the point where their sex lives become almost like infidelity to her. When she imagines his characters in intimate moments, she cannot help but interpret how this reflects on their own relationship. By default, she casts herself as the romantic partner to every protagonist and she casts Haley as the protagonist. As she reads, every character in the stories becomes a different facet of their relationship.

“Only a balance of power can keep the peace.”

Serena tries to imagine the ways in which Tony would defend his treachery, conjuring a high-minded justification for his behavior which posits him as the defender of world peace. She imagines that Tony would see himself as ensuring that a balance of power is maintained between everyone on the world stage. However, this truth also applies to the relationships in the book. Serena’s time with Max and Tony ends badly because there is an imbalance of power, while her relationship with Haley is only made possible at the end of the book when both have their deceit laid bare in the same way that Tony wanted both the east and west to have nuclear bombs. Only a balance of power in relationships can ensure that they are successful.

“Talking about our less fortunate sisters was our unintentional way of marking our own happiness, of keeping our feet on the ground.”

Serena and Haley exchange stories about their sisters as a way of exploring one another while maintaining some degree of emotional distance. The life stories of the two less fortunate sisters are like pieces of literature, allowing the writer and the reader to compare, contrast, and interpret as they would a novel. They are not necessarily judging the sisters in question, but one another’s reaction to personal tragedy. They can evaluate one another, but without exposing their own actions, history, or emotions.

“Now I was with Tom, I felt protected, I could afford to think nostalgically rather than tragically of our time together.”

Serena fears being alone. Only when she is in a relationship with Haley can she afford to think nostalgically about Tony. The new relationship provides her with cover, without the worry that she has lost the only person who will ever love her. For Serena, current love provides protection against fear of past mistakes. Only by demonstrating that she is capable of being loved is she able to fully embrace the lost loves of her past without fear that she will be left alone.

“This was a contract founded on mutual trust.”

Serena never wants to be lied to, whether in life or in fiction. She has views about novels and resents when a novelist uses literary techniques to create a sense of duplicity. She does not appreciate innovative uses of form or structure, or novels which trick the reader with a final reveal. She demands a mutual trust between reader and writer, but her personal life is replete with ways in which she contradicts this rule. She works in intelligence and lies to Haley, meaning that their love is not founded on mutual trust. An additional irony emerges at the end of the novel, when Haley reveals that Serena’s story was his final project. The novel ends in a way which destroys the mutual trust which Serena demanded but never truly offered in her own life.

“But how could I tell him that his story was worthless when I was, in part, responsible for it?”

After telling Haley about a mathematics puzzle which he turns into a story, Serena feels responsible for her lover’s misunderstanding. This sense of responsibility illustrates her growing affection for Haley. He is no longer just a target for the Sweet Tooth operation, nor is he just another man. The story is a product of them both and Serena feels responsible toward it as she would toward a child. She becomes actively involved in rewriting the piece and, in doing so, she echoes the behavior of her own overbearing mother. She tweaks and alters the story just as her mother shaped the course of Serena’s life. Like her mother, Serena takes satisfaction for the vicarious way in which she can indulge her ambitions.

“To him our lives were distant foolish things.”

Serena spent her entire childhood striving for the attention of her emotionally distant father, so much so that she still refers to him as the Bishop, rather than anything more familiar. This quest for validation from older men led Serena toward a string of relationships with older, more responsible, and more mature men. While her father might regard her life as distant and foolish, Serena feels a need to gain attention, acceptance, and love from older men. Tony, Max, and Haley all offer her some form of paternal validation which was lacking in her childhood.

“Everyone else was bound by the rules, and we were free.”

Serena and Haley see themselves as free from the rules which govern society, but their love has blinded them to reality. They are still bound by rules, they simply choose to ignore them on a temporary basis. Serena still works for MI5, and she is told how to operate by her superiors, but she chooses to ignore the rules which are put into place. She falls in love with her target, knowing that society’s rules threaten to ruin both of their lives if the truth is exposed. They are not free; they are simply choosing to ignore their limitations for the time being.

“I’d never liked From the Somerset Levels but I liked it now.”

Serena is not a fan of Haley’s short novel, but other people’s reactions force her to reconsider. When Max criticizes the book, she leaps to an insincere defense of Haley’s work and, by extension, of Haley. Given the romantic past between Max and Serena, she feels obliged to defend her current romantic partner against criticism. Serena feels guilty for lying to Haley, so the defense of his work in MI5 and to Max becomes a way in which she can seize back the moral obligation to the man she loves. By defending his work, she defends Haley, herself, and her role in the mission. Her defense may not be sincere, but the emotional obligation she feels toward Haley is very real.

“Everyone was weary, and at Leconfield House they were depressed as well as weary because the country had chosen the wrong man.”

MI5 has a lingering institutional bias against the left-wing politicians in Britain because they still feel that they are caught in an ideological war against the Soviet Union. A left-wing government is closer to the enemy than the previous right-wing government, so MI5 and its staff feel as though they are ceding territory to the enemy. Serena voted for the left-wing candidate, however, which again illustrates the way in which she is not suited to the organization. She stands out for many reasons, including her refusal to bow to the institutional pressures which shape the organization’s political biases.

“I could forgive him because everything could be resolved in Kumlinge, where the air and light were pure.”

In the context of Sweet Tooth, Kumlinge is not a real place. The island is only ever mentioned in passing, so serves as a metaphor for escape and freedom. The island is situated in the space between western Europe and the Soviet Union, almost like a neutral zone which is devoid of political obligations. Tony escapes there after betraying the west for the east because the island allows him to escape his obligations, his guilt, and his reality. The air in Kumlinge is light and pure because it is not laden down with the crushing banality of the Cold War. Kumlinge represents a freedom from the constant battles which have destroyed so many lives and continue to destroy many more.

“The feeling of being naughty and small.”

Serena is still a young woman and, despite her work for MI5 and her serious romantic relationships, she is still capable of being reduced to the role of a child. The interrogation by her bosses at MI5 has this exact effect, shattering her illusions of maturity and responsibility which she built up over the previous months. Though she thought she was in control of the situation, the unraveling of her life and the dressing down from her superiors is an unfortunate reminder for Serena that she is still capable of being made to feel like a child.