The best nineteen pages of Ian McEwan’s most recent novel Sweet Tooth are the final nineteen pages. Up until this point, the story held my interest, but didn’t quite manage to grab me with both hands, glue me to the chair, and compel me to read long into the night. On the surface, the novel seems like it should be a page-turner. The opening paragraph promises a first-hand account of a failed spy and her ruined lover.

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service. I didn’t return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing. (1)

Thus one might expect a tale the likes of which Ian Fleming or John Le Carré might spin. And yet, while McEwan paints a realistic and fascinating portrait of the inner workings of MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, Miss Frome’s mission itself seems rather unimportant. Yes, the love story is believable, but does the world need yet another love story? Where are the themes such as forgiveness and atonement that one might expect from a novel by Mr. McEwan? In short, as I finished the penultimate chapter of Sweet Tooth, I pondered whether this novel contained anything of substance.

Nineteen pages later, with a mixture of surprise, happiness, and relief, I realized how wrong I had been. The final chapter of this novel forced me to ask whether I had understood what this story was about. I realized immediately that I needed to re-read it closely and with a different set of spectacles, or more precisely from a different point of view. Through this process of re-reading I have become convinced that Ian McEwan’s brilliant novel is, at its core, profoundly about atonement, forgiveness, and above all, grace.

The narrator, Serena Frome, is a young woman who, after a largely quiet adolescence, goes to Cambridge University in the late 1960s to take a degree in maths. Although she would have preferred to study English, her mildly controlling mother thought otherwise. Studying English appeals to Serena because she is madly and superficially in love with books. She reads voraciously and quickly; her only interest, or rather her only need, is to be able to find characters and situations believable, or at least believable enough that she can imagine herself inhabiting the narrative. She confesses, “I was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say ‘Marry me’ by the end” (6).

Although Serena soon discovers that she is not really that good at maths, her appetite for fiction opens up an unexpected opportunity. The editor of a magazine invites her to write a breezy column about what she has read during the past week. Eventually Serena discovers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and her columns begin to lose their chatty vapid conviviality in favor of earnest but unreadable diatribes against Communism. The editor fires her, but Serena’s newfound political consciousness comes to the attention of a history professor and former MI5 operative, Tony Canning. The two have a passionate summer love affair that ends disastrously when Tony accuses Serena of attempting to bring their affair to the attention of his wife. Crushed by losing her lover and despairing of employment prospects, Serena decides she may as well take an interview with MI5 that Tony has obtained for her. She gets the job but is shocked to learn that she will be doing little more than clerical work: in 1972, the glass ceiling hangs low at Leconfield House.

Serena’s dull, bleak life continues for a time, split between copying memos, pub-crawling with her co-worker Shirley, and reading alone; however, a few mysteries slowly begin to complicate the narrative. One day Serena receives a letter relating the news that Tony has died: after retiring from Cambridge, he left his wife of thirty years and moved to a remote island in the Baltic. He does so not because of his affair with Serena but because he has cancer, a disease in 1970s Britain possessing the social stigma of AIDS in 1990s America. Tony had fabricated the accusation that Serena had tried to wreck his marriage in order to protect her from watching him die a lonely and miserable death. Not long later, Serena and Shirley are given an undercover assignment, during which Serena uncovers, beneath a bed topped by a blood-soaked mattress, a scrap of newspaper inscribed with Tony’s initials and the name of the island in the Baltic to which he retired, Kumlinge. What can this mean? Is the dried blood evidence of torture? Is the scrap of paper a message to Serena from Tony? Other mysteries begin to surface: Serena finds evidence that she is being watched; Shirley is ordered to spy on Serena, then summarily fired from MI5 without apparent cause.

Soon, Serena is offered the chance to participate in another undercover operation, code name “Sweet Tooth.” MI5 plans to recruit writers who evidence anti-Communist sympathies and offer them fat pensions so they can write. Serena is to pose as an employee of a non-governmental foundation, Freedom International; MI5’s involvement must remain well hidden, lest the integrity of the writers appear compromised. Serena’s target is Tom Haley, an essayist and short-story writer, who is a lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. Although her mission is simply to convince Tom to accept a generous pension of £2,000 a year, Serena and Tom become lovers. Each weekend for the next several months, Serena takes the train down to Brighton where the two establish a routine of frequent and passionate love-making, drinking, and writing. Serena, however, becomes more acutely aware with every weekend trip that she is living a lie and that she faces an impossible choice. To maintain her cover is fundamentally to betray the trust of a man she is coming more and more to love. To come clean is to betray her country, throw away her career, and most likely lose her lover as well.

Against the backdrop of their growing love and Serena’s mounting anxiety, Tom begins to achieve astonishing literary success. In a remarkably brief span of time, his first novel is published, nominated for and then receives a prestigious prize for literature. Despite his meteoric rise, Tom confesses the following secret to Serena on Christmas Eve: “He didn’t have an idea, not even a scrap of an idea, for another novel and he doubted that he ever would” (213). Yet, after the two briefly separate for Christmas holiday, Tom returns suddenly, inspired to write, sometimes churning out 15,000 words a day. He reveals nothing to Serena about the subject of his new novel, but promises to let her read it when complete. Tom is also possessed with an even greater passion for Serena. Even as their love-making acquires newfound intensity, their commitment to each other deepens, and finally, they declare their love for one another. Serena is tortured by the knowledge that she must confess the truth to Tom, and that when she does their love will end. The end of the novel’s penultimate chapter finds Serena in Tom’s empty apartment. She has traveled one final time to Brighton in an attempt finally to explain herself to the lover she has betrayed. On the kitchen table she finds a ­parcel tied up in brown paper and string, and on top of that a letter addressed to her.

The final chapter of Sweet Tooth is comprised of Tom’s letter to his lover, and as Serena reads it, the previous narrative replays itself in a way that neither she nor the reader had perceived. Without giving away all the novel’s secrets, I must mention three important items found in the letter. First, Tom relates that he knows Serena has been working as an undercover agent for MI5 as part of operation Sweet Tooth and has been aware of this secret far longer than Serena knows. Upon learning the truth, Tom at first is filled with rage, then is struck by a revelation:

This wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a calamitous betrayal and personal disaster. I’d been too busy being insulted by it to see it for what it was—an opportunity, a gift. I was a novelist without a novel, and now luck had tossed my way a tasty bone, the bare outline of a useful story. There was a spy in my bed, her head was on my pillow, her lips were pressed to my ear… Events would decide the plot. The characters were ready-made. I would invent nothing, only record. I’d watch you at work. I too could be a spy. (289)

The first forty pages of his new novel pour out of Tom in a frenzy, but they are worthless. He cannot find his voice. More accurately, he realizes that his voice is not the one to tell this tale. Again, in his own words:

This story wasn’t for me to tell. It was for you. Your job was to report back to me. I had to get out of my skin and into yours. I needed to be translated, to be a transvestite, to shoehorn myself into your skirts and heels, into your knickers, and carry your white glossy handbag on its shoulder strap. On my shoulder. Then start talking, as you. Did I know you well enough? Clearly not. Was I a good enough ventriloquist? Only one way to find out. (291)

The remaining pages of the letter, in which Tom the spy describes the task of researching and writing this novel through the eyes of his betrayer, are the most gripping pages of McEwan’s entire novel. When we reach the end, we discover the letter’s third and perhaps most important revelation.

The parcel wrapped up in paper is Tom’s novel. He has not given it to a publisher and has made no carbon copy. He wishes to publish it one day when all concerned are clear of the Official Secrets Act, but only with her permission. Serena has given Tom the gift of this novel, and he is giving it back to her. The fate of the novel, no less than the fate of their relationship, lies quite literally in her hands. She can, if she wishes, “throw it to the flames” (301). And so Tom ends his letter, and the novel, with this plea: “Dearest Serena, it’s up to you” (301).

In the theological vocabulary of the Christian tradition, God’s unmerited favor toward humankind is understood as grace. Grace is the word we use to refer to God’s gift of Christ, a gift we do not deserve but which enables forgiveness and reconciliation. This gift is moreover unexpected: we are, or ought to be, surprised by it. Tom’s gift of his novel to his betrayer is no less surprising, no less unmerited, and no less effective at enabling forgiveness and reconciliation. What kind of gift can make whole what justice has destroyed? What kind of gift can offer the possibility of forgiveness?

Ponder for a moment what is needed in order for forgiveness to occur. Picture yourself as a child standing before your parents, having been caught doing something naughty. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” they ask. The question might intend to cow you into silence, but it might also aim to elicit your side of the story in the hope that perhaps some extenuating circumstance might explain your bad behavior. Justice often is not blind; sometimes it must see clearly the whole story before it can assign guilt and offer forgiveness. Tom’s novel attempts to see clearly into the mind of Serena in the hope that he might come to understand her betrayal in a different light.

Surprisingly, the novel also turns out to be Tom’s gift to himself. Of course, his only motives in the beginning are vengeance and self-interest: to capitalize upon his betrayer’s infidelity, ruining her and producing a great novel in the bargain. But, he confesses to Serena, he had not reckoned what the process of inhabiting Serena’s mind and body would do to him. In seeking to know her, he comes to love her. In coming to love her, he is finally able to give her the gift she has longed for her whole life: a novel that ends in a marriage proposal. In writing this novel, Tom himself finds a way to forgive the woman who has betrayed him.

The novel’s last sentence is Tom’s plea to Serena, both to accept the novel and to start their relationship afresh. Does she accept? We do not know, and there are worrying hints that in fact they never see each other again, but we have to remind ourselves that these hints are from Tom’s pen, written before the story’s end. They don’t tell us what Serena knows to have happened in the future, only what Tom imagines might happen.

As a biblical theologian, I cannot resist drawing an analogy to the ending of Mark’s Gospel. That narrative ends with an angel at the empty tomb of Jesus instructing the two Marys and Salome to tell Jesus’ disciples that he has risen from the dead. Then the Evangelist writes, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). Not unlike this novel Sweet Tooth, Mark’s Gospel ends on a surprising note: an unexpected and potentially life-changing discovery followed by an unknown response. How will these women—the two Marys, Salome, and Serena—respond? This question is intended, I believe, to prompt us to re-read the text, asking, “What did I miss?” In doing so, we indeed discover much that we had not noticed, but we must finally admit that we can never definitively determine the response of any of these women: the three women at the tomb are lost to history, and Serena of course only exists in the mind of Ian McEwan. Can we ever know whether this stunning revelation, this gracious gift, achieved its hoped-for reconciliation? The very fact that we can indeed read the ending of Mark’s Gospel suggests that the women overcame their fear and proclaimed the Good News. Likewise, the fact that I hold in my hand Tom’s novel is, I believe, McEwan’s way of suggesting that in the end this surprising act of grace does indeed open up the door to forgiveness and ­reconciliation.

Julien C. H. Smith is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Theology in Christ College at Valparaiso University.