Of course, Serena and Tom end up embarking on an affair. ![]() Serena is given a writer, Tom Haley, and is sent to Brighton where he lives and works to offer him a grant, generous enough to allow him to write unimpeded by the concerns of wondering where the next meal would be coming from. Sweet Tooth is the cosy Brit equivalent of the grander US schemes by the CIA to infiltrate the culture, quietly encouraging writers and artists through a system of grants to produce art that hopefully propagates a way of looking at the world that supports their own particular interests. It is here, alongside a friendship with a chubby interesting commoner called Shirley Shilling and faltering relationship with a higher up with the seemingly preposterous name of Max Greatorex, that Serena is initiated into a scheme known as Sweet Tooth. Serena, the daughter of an austere, distant bishop and a gently tender mother with a nascent feminist streak and a desire for her beautiful, intelligent daughter to do well, is urged away from a desire to pursue a degree in English in favour of maths, and helped – thanks in part to a sad affair with a tutor who himself enjoyed a shady second life in the early postwar years – into a career in the secret service. ‘My name is Serena Frome,’ we are told at the novel’s opening, and then curiously (although less curiously when you’ve made your way to the end of the book) a short bracketed statement ‘(rhymes with plume)’ – ‘and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service.’ Herein lies the tale.
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