![]() It’s a wearying trope: women as instruments and catalysts of male insight. Roland learns from them all, lesson after lesson, everything from the demands of genius to the virtue of a clean kitchen table. And then there is Alissa, Roland’s first wife, who chooses her writerly ambitions over motherhood, and leaves him in embittered awe. There’s Roland’s best friend, who teaches him how to die and his mother-in-law, who – for the briefest of moments – lives the life she wanted. There’s Miss Cornell, of course, with her piano lessons and her terrifying thrall and Roland’s timorous mother, whose cast-iron silences hide a story of wartime shame. Next to them, McEwan’s everyman feels a little gormless and grey. Lessons is the book it hopes to be: a hymn to the “commonplace and wondrous”, a tale of humane grace.īut it’s the female characters – from joyful children to art monsters – who give this novel its heft and verve (and perhaps its title). ![]() They are novels pinned to time but, in their intimacies, they also affirm something elemental. Lessons is McEwan’s answer to William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, John Williams’s Stoner, or Richard Ford’s Bascombe trilogy: novels that refract history through the life of one man. So, too, is the humour (a fight with a junior minister – two silver-haired gents wrestling over cremation ashes – is a last-act delight). The self-interrogative courage that was so palpably missing from The Cockroach is here. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Īfter newsletter promotion Lessons is the book it hopes to be: a hymn to the “commonplace and wondrous”, a tale of grace For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. He’s voted the right way, after all: his conscience is clear. And yet, beyond smuggling Bob Dylan records into East Berlin in his 20s, Roland is never quite impelled to do anything he’s complicit in his complacency. As an adult, he watches as those same bullyboys weaponise that scorn. At his state boarding school, young Roland watches his classmates learn to be “conservative guardians of the existing order”, and perfect their tools of influence: satire, parody, mockery. Roland is a prototypical baby boomer: raised by war-haunted veterans, loved at arm’s length, and schooled in “nuanced loutishness”. McEwan’s sights are aimed squarely at the generation to which he belongs: those postwar children who “lolled on history’s aproned lap, nestling into a little fold of time, eating all the cream”. Lessons is a portrait of sociopolitical entropy, a lesson in squandering. Roland is McEwan’s answer – a man who is forever mistaking his indecision for powerlessness, and his comforts for luck. “By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling wall to the storming of the American Capitol?” Lessons asks. ![]() The reunification of Europe glasnost and perestroika Thatcherism and the Aids crisis New Labour and the Iraq invasion Brexit and the pandemic: feckless Roland will drift through it all. He will drift into marriage and fatherhood, he will drift from career to career, and he will drift through postwar Britain. Roland will “drift through an unchosen life” – a creature of reaction. ![]() “That’s a prediction, not a curse.” It is both. “You’ll spend the rest of your life looking for what you’ve had here,” Miss Cornell warns him. He will mistrust his memory, his intentions, his desires. Roland will forever struggle to give his encounter with Miss Cornell moral shape, to pin down “the nature of the harm”. The encounter reeks of schoolboy fantasies: an insatiable older woman who offers carnal instruction, then repairs to the kitchen to prepare a Sunday roast. It is “the moment from which all else fanned out and upwards with the extravagance of a peacock’s tail”. What happens between them in that quiet cottage will score a line across Roland’s life. Roland fears that the world is about to end, and he will die a virgin. The boy, Roland Baines, is 14 his teacher, Miss Cornell, is 25. He stands on her doorstep in his drainpipe trousers and sharp-toed winklepickers, twitchy with eroticised terror. In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, an English schoolboy arrives unannounced at his piano teacher’s house. Can earnestness be a form of literary rebellion? It’s compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical. McEwan’s 17th novel is old-fashioned, digressive and indulgently long the hero is a gold-plated ditherer, and the story opens with a teenage wank (few books are improved by an achingly sentimental wank).
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