“Lessons” by Ian McEwan:McEwan has always been a moralist, most of his novels engage in moral arguments and combine harsh reality with excursions into the strangest chambers of the mind. And so, too does this novel, another profound demonstration of his remarkable skill.
In fact it proved to be one of his best I have read so far and among his most engrossing. It certainly is one of his longest but that, too proved to be a great delight. It is almost old-fashioned in its talkative, discursive humane way, full of insight and intelligence. And it is, with the inclusion of autobiographical details, his most personal. The language, as so often with McEwan is beautiful. He delights in close observation and the resulting rumination on the observed. Not to forget the subtle, rather agreeable humor, very British.
The book is an exploration of a lifetime and an era, a stretch of 70 years from the postwar decade to the present day and McEwan divinely constructs and lets us follow the life of a failed writer/ poet/ concert pianist, who is an ordinary man with once grand aspirations and a complicated past. We are drawn into this life, watch it unfold, connect and take part. The book thrives on the interplay between global events, the Cold War, Chernobyl, Brexit, COVID-19, and the private turmoils in the live of Roland Baines.
Roland is born three years after the Second World War, watches the Iron Curtain go up and the Berlin Wall come down. He watches his country being maneuvered, not always successfully, through difficult times by the hands of Labour and the Tories, watches the fall of Margaret Thatcher and the rise of Blair, sees AIDS recede, there is 9/11 and then there is Brexit. There is the emergence of COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown. Against this backdrop of political happenings his own personal tragedies and triumphs play out over the course of almost eight decades. The novel moves back and forward in time, reflecting Roland’s memories of his experience.
Lessons begins with the memory of a remarkably harrowing piano lesson. At the age of 11 Roland had a disastrous encounter with Miriam Cornell, his piano-teacher, a woman of 22 years, who in an act of shocking intentional grope, pinches the boy’s thigh, strokes his crotch with a lingering finger, puts her hand under the elastic of his underpants and strikes his knee with the edge of a ruler. She pretends this abuse is a lesson and later on, when the boy is 14, draws him into a torrid sexual two-year affair, intoxicating and destructive, that leaves him marked, confused and the reader repulsed. Psychologically and sexually this will haunt the boy all his life.
Except that it doesn’t. Not really.
At this point the book could have easily become a moral tale, based on a single moral question. But McEwan has the skill to show us that no single incident is ever the whole story. For Roland, this means no single person defines who he is and shows him, through retrospective, the great gift of time: forgetting and overcoming.
Long after the disastrous affair with his teacher Roland meets and marries another woman, Alissa, soon to be a world-famous novelist who achieves publication only at the cost of abandoning her baby boy and husband. Roland commits himself to the loving labour of raising his son alone. Here is another blow dealt by a woman and Roland still goes on.
“In settled expansive mood Roland occasionally reflected on the events and accidents, personal and global, minuscule and momentous that had formed and determined his existence.”
As Roland is attempting to make sense of his life as lessons, stories of cause and effect, long-ago catastrophes slowly transform into soft tremors and the woman who was bound to leave the biggest impact on his psyche becomes, in the end, one who is hardly remembered.
Roland, in the end, knows what he always wanted and needed, which are very simple needs: Kids around the table, a cat in the garden, a garden, good wine and friends to spend an evening with. He wants a hearth to warm him. And luckily he is given one, even though tragedy has its play with him more than once, too. This is life, after all.
Roland is an everyday unheroic hero, one who has been given a life which he must now lead, regardless of the difficulties, to its end. His acceptance and determination keep him going. And in the end it dawns on him that these lessons given to him were really gifts.
This is a wide-angle, epic and engrossing family history, a book about life, about who we are, about how we live. It raises many moral questions and covers many topics and my pleasure in reading this novel was immense. Lessons is a wise book and beautifully, compassionately crafted great fiction.
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