Our fifth book of the term – Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth – is the first we’ve discussed which didn’t make the Booker shortlist (or indeed any shortlist of note). Having won the Booker in 1998 though for Amsterdam (and having made the shortlist for Atonement, On Chesil Beach, The Comfort of Strangers, Black Dogs and Saturday), McEwan has certainly earned his place on the syllabus.
The big topics of our first discussion were metafiction and McEwan’s use of a female narrator.
Metafiction (fiction which is aware of its nature as a piece of fiction) is a literary tradition which spans various art forms and stretches as far back as Shakespeare. But in our session, we were interested in asking the question: what’s the point? Many members of the group agreed that metafiction should have a purpose (as opposed to being used as a trendy ‘clever gimmick’ or to bag a prize). In Atonement, for instance, the devastating revelation that Cecilia and Robbie’s love story was a fiction of Bryony’s invention offers us more than a heartbreaking twist. It also forces us to question our relationship with fiction, since the love story would be just as fictional if Bryony hadn’t invented it (after all, Bryony, Cecilia and Robbie are all nothing more than mere inventions of McEwan’s hand). In this example, the metafictional narrative is not only effective in twisting the plot, it also leaves the reader pondering their relationship with the text long after its conclusion. Metafiction, therefore, has a point in Atonement. The reader could feasibly turn back to Chapter One and start again, and could gain new insight by reading the story twice. Whether this is true of Sweet Tooth is debatable. It undeniably twists the plot as Atonement does, since our perception of Tom is changed. But we are still expected to believe the same fictional story – the only change is who the story is narrated by. Instead of an unnamed third person narrator, our narrator is Tom, and whether this has any significant bearing on the story – or our appreciation of it – is up for debate.
Perhaps the most interesting element of the revelation that Sweet Tooth is ‘written by Tom’ instead of by a generic third person narrator (i.e. McEwan?) is that it acts as a justification for a lazy and underdeveloped female narrator. Many of us agreed that Serena’s voice was unconvincing, insofar as she lacked a complex interior world. Since McEwan has successfully written a variety of female protagonists (Black Dogs, Atonement, On Chesil Beach) this seemed to be an intentional choice, but the group felt that the ‘twist of metafiction’ was not enough to redeem the shallow nature of the storytelling, which came as a consequence of Tom’s limited (misogynist? Egotistical?) narration.
We also talked about the use of the cold war as a historical setting for the text. This article from The Guardian provided some interesting insights from McEwan as to the value of the setting for authors.
Further reading
Either of McEwan’s early short story collections – First Love, Last Rites and Between The Sheets – may be of interest, as they contain stories upon which the short stories written by Tom in Sweet Tooth are based.
- Click here to download the session handout.
- Click here to download Ann’s presentation from our first session.
WEA Kenilworth literature group 