メタフィクショナルな愛の確立 : イアン・マキューアン『甘美なる作戦』における欺瞞

This essay examines Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (2012) by exploring how the motif of deceit governs the structure of the novel as well as the relationships between its characters. Set in the Cold War era, Sweet Tooth is a spy novel filled with pretence, deceit and betrayal. It tells the story of Serena Frome, a new recruit to MI5 in the early 1970s. Sweet Tooth is also a romance novel, as it depicts Serena’s romantic relationships with several men. Since she is a spy, Serena’s romances always assume a tinge of pretence, and her love is compromised by untruthfulness. From the middle of the novel onwards, the story pivots on the relationship between Serena and Thomas Haley, a promising young novelist. Serena is assigned to a secret literary project called ‘Sweet Tooth.’ Pretending to be the representative of a non-political literary fund, she offers generous financial support to Haley. She succeeds in deceiving him into accepting the money, which was actually sent by the intelligence service. Much to her inconvenience, however, she falls in love with Haley and she finds herself torn between her love and her dishonesty with him. Haley eventually discovers her secret. Infuriated by her betrayal, he initiates his own secret project to take advantage of her. Serena and Haley find themselves stuck in a web of lies. As the story unfolds, deceit acquires a new liberating meaning. Seeking his revenge on his lover, Haley secretly writes a novel in which he disguises himself as Serena. To his surprise, this deception deepens his love for her, as his lying and pretending creates opportunities for empathy and connection. Haley also observes that deception in espionage is inseparably connected to literary imagination. The latter is needed for the former to be successful. The fiasco of Operation Sweet Tooth emphasises this point as effectively as the success of Operation Mincemeat does. Sweet Tooth builds to a blissfully happy ending, where love and literary imagination thrive on deceit. Sweet Tooth is not only a story about deceit, but it is also a story that deceives. The idea of deceit is critical to understanding the novel’s highly elaborate fictional structure. Focalised through Serena, Sweet Tooth pretends to be an ordinary novel that creates and describes a fictional world. However, it actually turns out to be a creation within the fictional world, a novel written by Haley inside the story. As the novel reveals its nested structure, the reader finally realises that Sweet Tooth actually refers to two different novels, the one which is written by McEwan that exists in the real world and the one which is written by Haley that only exists within the fictional world of McEwan’s Sweet Tooth . Both novels possess exactly the same appearance and are comprised of the same words and sentences. The novel’s disguise is clever and deceptive. The reader is apparently expected to look for the author in Haley. McEwan unabashedly uses his own life to create Haley, thereby constructing a part of the novel to be a fictitious biography. Sweet Tooth contains several stories attributed to Haley, some of which obviously retell McEwan’s early short stories and some others can be considered to allude to the author’s own stories. In addition to the metafictional twist, the novel weaves fiction with reality in its reflexive reference to the author. The metafictional ending of the novel seals the love that Serena and Haley have for each other. Haley’s second novel begins as a revenge mission and ends as a testament to their love. Fiction-making in Sweet Tooth is allowed to perform the benign and joyful act of securing the lovers’ happiness. Sadly, in Atonement (2001), another novel by McEwan with the same metafictional trick, writing a novel can never fully atone for Briony’s grave mistake. The story of Sweet Tooth might appear a little too sugary, possibly shallow. However, it must be noted that its sweetness is achieved through the novel’s painstakingly coordinated configuration that centres around the recurring motif of deceit.