![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She wanted to live up to Tony’s expectations - in this she resembles many le Carré characters, who are eager to please and who find it alarmingly easy to lie - and she soon finds herself with an entry-level job at the intelligence service. She also emerges as a highly unprofessional employee who thinks little of endangering her first big mission - never mind the reputation of the intelligence service - by getting romantically involved with the very subject of her assignment.Īs Serena tells it, she was recruited for MI5 in 1972 by one Tony Canning, the married, middle-aged history tutor she was seeing while she was a student at Cambridge. In this case Serena comes across as a smug, narcissistic young thing who had no scruples about bouncing from one lover to another while using or deceiving them with cavalier aplomb. McEwan has demonstrated a gift for portraying disagreeable characters with psychological precision: the pair of conniving and self-deluding opportunists in “Amsterdam,” the children who bury their mother in the basement in “The Cement Garden,” the 13-year-old girl in “Atonement” who tells a monstrous lie that will send her sister’s boyfriend to jail and shatter the family’s sheltered existence. ![]()
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