Review of LESSONS by Ian McEwan (New Release)

4 Stars

This book could be described as an introspective journey through one man’s life over 60 years.

The novel begins in 1986 when Roland Baines is 37 years old.  His wife Alissa has just left him and their seven-month-old son Lawrence to pursue a writing career.  This abandonment, which forces him into single parenthood, starts him thinking about his thereto restless, “shapeless existence” and what has caused him to live so aimlessly.  Since abruptly ending his formal education at 16, he has been adrift; after a decade spent travelling around the world while engaged in less than meaningful relationships, he married but lacks steady employment.  The novel shows Roland trying to understand himself and come to terms with his past while struggling through life, sometimes successfully and sometimes less so, and trying to learn its lessons. 

The book examines how formative experiences and global events shape people’s lives:  Roland “reflected on the events and accidents personal and global, minuscule and momentous that had formed and determined his existence.”  Roland’s experiences as a child and teenager seem to have left him living much of his life with the hope that “What he once had, he had to have again.”  For instance, a “rapturous week” of unfettered freedom and play as a child has left him with “a notion of impossible freedom and adventure [which] still spoiled him for the present” and a feeling that “His real life, the boundless life, was elsewhere.”  As a result, he rejected opportunities and avoided commitments and salaried employment “to remain at large” and be available for the next adventure.  His boarding school experience has also impacted his life.  At the age of 11, he was dropped off at a boarding school in England while his parents removed themselves physically and emotionally by returning to Libya.  He attracts the attentions of Miriam Cornell, a piano teacher, whose relationship with him “rewired [his] brain.”  He concludes that he has drifted “through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.  He had never made an important decision.”

Of course, others too are impacted by formative experiences.  Alissa believes her life was scarred by a childhood spent around her mother’s sense of failure and bitterness so she takes decisive steps not to lead her mother’s “second-rate life.”  Though not aware of his mother’s past until much later, Roland learns that her life had been framed by a “distant sorrow that hung about her and what she grieved for.” 

Global events can also be traumatic, and Roland’s personal life is set against the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chernobyl, the 9/11 attacks, Brexit, and the COVID  pandemic.  These events over which he has no control all impact his life and influence his behaviour.  The possibility of annihilation during the Cuban missile crisis, for instance, motivates Roland to lose his virginity while the possibility of radiation from Chernobyl has him taking extra precautions to protect himself and Lawrence.  And the reader is told about Alissa’s mother and Roland’s parents whose lives show that “Nothing forces public events on private lives like a war.” 

The novel also examines whether it is possible to fulfill fully our needs and desires without hurting others.  Roland attends a lecture on the topic of the ruthlessness of artists, the presenter asking whether we should “forgive or ignore their single-mindedness or cruelty in the service of their art” or “Whether cruel behaviour enabled great or execrable poetry made no difference.  A cruel act remained just that.”  Alissa abandons her husband and son to become a writer.  Though her novels are lauded, her choices affect others:  “If [Alissa’s mother] had harmed her daughter, what of the harm that daughter had done her son?”  Should she be forgiven?  And if she were a man, would she be condemned so harshly?  Certainly Alissa’s fate at the end versus Roland’s is thought-provoking. 

Roland is not always a likeable character.  At times, he seems full of self-pity as he considers the roads not taken.  He does redeem himself, however, because he does experience personal growth.  Though “he thought that he hadn’t learned a thing in life and he never would,” he does become more generous in his views and sees that “They were all doing their best to get by with what they had.”  Though he understands that “our beginnings shape us and must be faced,” he also knows that he should be grateful because “The accidental fortune was beyond calculation to have been born” when and where he was.  Perhaps the most important lesson is that we “must go on trying to understand . . . and it would never end.”

This is a dense book and there is much in it, much more than I can discuss here.  The one part I did not enjoy is the discussions of British politics, though, admittedly, my ignorance of that topic affected my enjoyment of those sections.  The discussion of the White Rose movement in Germany became tedious, though I do admit to doing some further research because I wasn’t aware of that resistance group.

This is not my favourite McEwan novel, but I certainly recommend it to fans of his work.  I will certainly continue to read his books and, should time allow, probably re-read this one.

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

(I recently read Julian Barnes’ latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, and could not but notice Ian McEwan giving his protagonist similar views to EF:  “’Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. . . . It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology.  It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death.’”  Is there something in the air or water in England?)