Sweet Tooth's mingling of fact and fiction is a deliberate ploy. Real figures such as Angus Wilson and Martin Amis make cameo appearances and coexist alongside McEwan's fictional creations. Stella Rimington is in there too, disguised as Millie Trimingham. The reader is meant to scrutinise these characters, discern their dim outlines and fill in the gaps accordingly. "My task was to reconstruct myself through the prism of your consciousness," says Haley at one point, and it is effectively McEwan's task too. Haley is in part an autobiographical sketch: he and McEwan share a degree from Sussex, a backlist of short stories, contacts in literary London. It's a nod to the tendency of readers to search for clues about an author's experience within the work, but also a narrative device, an aside about how literature is consumed.
Serena is, as she puts it, "the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form." She devours novels quickly, reading for enjoyment without pausing to consider hidden meanings. A "born empiricist", she read maths instead of English at Cambridge, and so lacks the mental tools to read critically or to get "the measure of the artifice" involved in creating literature. Consequently, she is open to being double-crossed by the author who can get one over an ill-equipped reader, rather as Soviet censors did not detect implied criticism of Stalin in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam: it flew under their radar. She makes for a pretty hopeless spy.
The obvious writer-as-double-agent and fiction-as-espionage parallels are drawn to the full in Sweet Tooth. The relationship between Serena and Haley mirrors that between reader and writer: "I said I didn't like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn't possible without tricks." For "he" we are meant to understand Haley but also McEwan in his guise. He too likes tricks, and plays an almighty one on his reader at the end of the novel, giving the plot a smart twist to leave the reader feeling double-crossed.
Does it follow that, in giving the reader his own world, and himself in it, McEwan is the basest of writers? He certainly takes the advantages offered by his authorial position, the opportunities it affords for clever brinkmanship, and the obvious chances to drop in clues and signposts for even the basest reader to read below the surface level of plot. But if McEwan likes tricks, they are played as in chess-and it's no coincidence that Serena is a chess player-in plain sight: if he gets you, it's only because you missed something. The real trick, it seems, is to know when you're a pawn in someone else's game, and if Sweet Tooth is to be believed, that goes for writers as well as for readers.
