Lessons by Ian McEwan

 

Lessons by Ian McEwan.

Published 13th September 2022 by Jonathan Cape, Vintage.

From the cover of the book:

While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.

Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means ­- literature, travel, friendship, drugs, politics, sex and love.

His journey raises important questions. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape us and our memories? What role do chance and contingency play in our existence? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past?

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Roland Baine is a man all at sea. His wife Alissa has mysteriously left him out of the blue, and he finds himself in sole care of their baby son Lawrence. Exhausted, Roland's sleep-deprived brain forces upon him the memory of the first time he met his piano teacher Miriam at the age of eleven - the woman who later took charge of his sexual awakening at fourteen and shaped the course of his life.

As the years go by the story follows Roland through his trials and tribulations, moving back and forth between the present and his recollections of the past. All the while, major world events play out in the background as he tries to make sense of the hand life has dealt him.

This is a complex novel, not easily summed up in a brief review, and it touches on so much about the intricacies of human relationships, delving into how childhood experiences shape expectation, and what happens when the wrong people get involved with each other. The scope of this novel is really quite breath taking, but McEwan's skill as an accomplished author keeps all the far reaching threads in perfect control. 

As Roland tells the unflinching story of his life, McEwan deftly bleeds the present and the past into each other to show us the significant moments of his and his family's history that are pertinent to the truth he is trying to get to about how and why events play out like they do. In particular, you find Roland going back over the events of his sexual encounters with Miriam, and as he does he gradually comes to realise that rather than being involved in a love affair, he was the victim of calculated abuse. 

On the whole, the characters in this story are quite difficult to like, and they all suffer from self-absorption. Many of them are also victims of control, manipulation, abandonment, and rejection. There is a lot of sadness, bewilderment and frustration in this story, which makes it a difficult read at times, but there is also love, hope, tenderness, and dark humour that pulls you in and keeps you going through the hard-hitting moments. 

My favourite thing about this book is the way McEwan weaves a really intimate story rife with dysfunction against the backdrop of wider historical events. The periodic references to the incredibly powerful episodes of history occurring in the background are used beautifully to echo and enhance what is happening in Roland's story, and in a wider sense to show how they impact on the attitudes of Roland and everyone around him. Each one evokes the perfect atmosphere and emotion, from early events in Roland's life, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, through to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and right up to the recent Covid pandemic. I also find myself supremely impressed with the way McEwan uses the theme of 'lessons' throughout, asking questions about what we can learn from our own lives, as well as global events. It is all really rather brilliant.

The writing is a joy to consume, and even with the high toll on your emotions, for a book as a smidge under 500 pages the story absolutely flies by. I easily polished off this novel in a couple of days, and thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in the work of a master wordsmith. This really is something of a literary epic, and is sure to become a modern classic. 

Lessons is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Jonathan Cape for sending me a hardcover copy of this book in return for an honest review, and to Random Things Tours for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.