Then Serena falls in love with the young novelist she is assigned to bring on to MI5’s payroll. A fellow MI5 recruit kisses her passionately but seems to expect intel on Canning in return. Canning abruptly ends their affair, indicting Serena for leaving the silk blouse he gave her in his hamper-something he instructed her to do. It is roughly at this early point in the story that McEwan makes it clear none of Serena’s relationships can be taken at face value. Enthralled by idyllic country weekends, Serena allows Canning to groom her as a “Cold Warrior.” Being Canning’s lover becomes Serena’s raison d’être, but he has another job in mind for her-officer with MI5, the internal affairs branch of Britain’s secret service. Then she meets Tony Canning, a history professor some 30 years her senior, who compliments her student-rag column “What I Read Last Week” (discontinued when she shifted from pithy pieces about modern romances to anti-Communist diatribes inspired by Solzhenitsyn). It is 1972, Serena has just graduated from Cambridge with a mediocre third-class honours degree in maths and she’s a bit at loose ends. Why become a spy? For Serena Frome (rhymes with plume), narrator of McEwan’s new novel, one reason is: nothing better to do.
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