Lessons by Ian McEwan
When 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. 2,000 miles from his mother’s protective love, stranded at an unusual 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 Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes, leaving him alone with their baby son. He is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence. As the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
From the Suez and Cuban Missile crises, 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, sex and politics. A profound love is cut tragically short. Then, in his final years, he finds love again in another form. 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 our lives and our memories? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past
About the author
Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections.
His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller.
Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.
Review
‘Lessons’ is an ambitious introspection of one man’s life that flits over decades and touches on important historical events, their effects on Roland Baines and how he navigates his life. It has an autobiographical feeling as the author uses aspect of his life as inspiration - his childhood in Syria and this gives the story a richness and depth of texture. This is unequivocally an Ian McEwan book. The prose, structure, and strength of the characters all are examples of his superb writing. We know he is a prize winning author and this experience and sophistication shows in ‘Lessons’. I'm still thinking about it days later. I ended up listening to the audiobook as I was in migraine hell but I think this added to the experience as it has lingered in my psyche and Simon McBurney’s voice will forever be Roland Bains for me.
For me fundamentally this book is about trauma and how it can shape and distort someone’s life decades later without them being aware. Roland was groomed as a child by someone in authority, someone who should have been protecting him rather than abusing him. Do we as readers, as humans find it more shocking because his abuser was a woman? We shouldn't as abuse is abuse no matter how or inflicted by whom. Roland has scars from this period in his life and these reverberate through the decades until his later stages in life. Again, McEwan challenges the constructs of gender and societies version of feminity but having Roland’s wife leave him and his young baby in order to embrace her potential which eventually leads to an illustrious writing career. If a man had done this it wouldn't be shocking, but yet we judge Alissa for this. Well, I didn't but then I am one of those strange people who aren't maternal.
This is an exploration of life, how one becomes at peace with themselves, the journey it takes and the events which shape it. I loved it. Roland is a complex man, but a good one. This is a beautiful narrative that weaves his personal history with world events and we come to see that we are all the same in a sense. We carry on moving forward, marching to an internal drum - some of us flounder but others flourish and Roland I believed flourished.
Let me know if you read this one.
