Reading for pleasure

Sweet Tooth

Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape: £18.99; e-book £8.09)

This is a beautifully circular, balanced literary story. McEwan captures the essence and spirit of the early 1970s as Britain faced the miners’ strike, the three day week, the seesaw of Heath and Wilson Governments. 

Serena Frome (“rhymes with plume”) is a beautiful daughter of a rather cold and austere Anglican bishop, who, to please her mother, studies maths, gaining a third at Cambridge, rather than pursue her own desire of studying English. She is a bookworm and voracious reader of all literature. She has a brief (and abruptly ended) affair with Tony Canning, a Cambridge don, who it transpires worked for MI5 and eases her passage into the service. In an organisation not known for women in its higher ranks (there are disguised references to Stella Rimington), Serena is asked to undertake an assignment ("Sweet Tooth") to engage the services of Tom Haley, an aspiring author with a first in English from the University of Sussex, to write works seen to support “his hard pressed fellows in the Eastern bloc… signs petitions for persecuted writers, engages his mendacious Marxist colleagues here… generally swims against the orthodox flow”. In doing so, Serena will act as the representative of a front organisation that will fund Haley for two or three years. 

Serena falls for Tom’s writing (to which we are also exposed), then for him, to the extent that she questions whether she should disclose her true role, constantly challenging her self doubts. There is a brilliant twist in the tale as Tom warns Serena: “The end is already there in the beginning. There is no plot. It is a meditation.” This is a book about books, about authors’ need to write. It reflects the history of the period where the state sought to influence the intelligentsia and infiltrate their political opponents through funding of publications such as the covert CIA funding of “Encounter”, which until its demise with the fall of Communism in 1991 sought to counter the notion of Cold War neutralism. A rewarding and satisfying read.

Double Cross

Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury: £16.99; paperback £7.99; e-book £2.84)

Ben Macintyre is a redoubtable storyteller. Following the success of "Operation Mincemeat", where Macintyre recounted the deception played on the Germans as part of Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings, he tells here the intriguing narrative of the Double Cross system within British intelligence, run to the same end. "Dusko" Popov, Roman Czerniawski, Lily Sergeyev, Juan Garcia and Elvira de la Fuentes Chaudoir played a crucial, dangerous and audacious deception on German intelligence of the highest order with the greatest success: they created in the minds of the German military and through the interception of the dispatches relayed by the Japanese Ambassador to the Third Reich, in Hitler's mind, that the D-Day assault to regain Europe would take place anywhere other than it was actually intended. In doing so, these double agents created a web of fictitious spies, sub-agents, armies, military manoeuvres and preparation and informants.

The tensions and potential for catastrophic outcomes are superbly recorded, whether through Communist spies within British intelligence (Anthony Blunt), or the infighting with MI6. As Macintyre writes, "the constant need to monitor, cajole, flatter and sustain these difficult people was taking a toll". One was Lily Sergeyev, whose mistrust of her handlers was such that she almost deployed her secret security check, an additional coded dash to alert the Germans that she was being controlled by the British, after they failed to send her beloved dog Babs to join her in London (or even killed it). This is a riveting book. We can only wonder and await what other material Mr Macintyre has to fascinate us with.

The Newlyweds

Nell Freudenberger (Penguin: £12.99; e-book £7.99)

This is a stunning book! Amina Mazid, a 24-year-old, intelligent, articulate, self driven Bangladeshi, meets George Stillman over the Internet, she while she is teaching English, he looking for a bride. After 11 months of emailing they meet, marry and settle in George's home town of Rochester. He is attracted to Amina as she is "straightforward" and does not "play games". We observe them, mainly Amina, as she settles into a new life in the United States. However, as the story slowly, tantalisingly and superbly unwraps itself, we learn they both hold secrets, never disclosed but which they need to face.

On one level, this is a love story across the cultural and geographical divide of a couple coming to terms with reality in the early days of their marriage, not having experienced the usual development of friendship and closeness through courtship. However it is much more. The author subtly explores the demands and stresses required by those settling and adjusting to life in a new country, with light references to the pressures and prejudice faced by some in the US post-9/11. More particularly we learn of the huge divide, cultural, educational and social, between the developed west and the developing east, highlighting the desire for self development and learning in the latter in the face of a lack of opportunity. Poignant and beautifully written.

Savage Continent:
Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

Keith Lowe (Penguin: £25; e-book £14.99)

The European Union is at a crossroads. The euro is under pressure. The EU has been granted legal personality and is soon to embark on new path under the Lisbon Treaty. It has also been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The latter was met with some scorn. Those who did should read and reflect on this important and illuminating book. 

As with other historians, Lowe has been able to scour recently opened archives in former eastern European states and Russia. There is much rehearsing of the acts committed against civilians by those seen as liberating forces, particularly the Red Army. The mass rape of women in the path of the advancing Soviets has a tragic resonance in more recent and current disputes. The sheer horror faced by civilians after the collapse of state mechanisms, and the human drive for survival, are acutely referenced, as is the aid that needed to be provided and faced by the Allies, and organisations such as the Red Cross. One is 60 pages in before the word "hope" appears. 

We also read of the internecine conflicts which either continued from or had their foundation in the state of affairs at the end of the war. We also read of the mass movement of people, in what Lowe calls ethnic cleansing. There is an interesting chapter on the role of the partisans, whether under Tito or in Poland and the Baltic states, against the post-war Russian occupying forces and how they are now being viewed in a less honourable and favourable light than previously perceived. Read and reflect.