And with this I have officially finished all
the hard-copy McEwan books that I own (although I still want to read Black
Dogs).
Much like in Sweet Tooth, McEwan
develops both a love and a spy story in parallel, and I feel that he doesn’t do
either excessively well. Somehow I had very little doubt as to where the love
story was going to end (it is pretty much stated from the start that the
relationship won’t last, and it’s also quite clear that Leonard doesn’t really understand
Maria). As for the spy story, despite the cheesiness of the depiction of the
British/American divide, its premises are actually really quite interesting (and
Operation Gold something that even I had never heard of) – it’s just so hard to
write a great spy story in a country that has produced Graham Greene and John
Le Carré (and maybe I should also add to this list Alan Bennett, whose work on
the Cambridge Spies was actually really quite interesting).
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