Lessons

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 One of Ian McEwan’s astonishing qualities as a writer is the variety of novels he completes. Looking back through my posts, I can see I have written about Machines Like Me, an interesting alternative history novel with echoes of Frankenstein; Black Dogs, a cold-war love story; On Chesil Beach, a tragic story with a moment of sexual confusion at its centre; and Solar, a novel with a climate crisis theme and a flawed protagonist. Leaving aside Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement (novels I have read but not written about) Lessons, I think, is the McEwan novel I have enjoyed the most.

Roland Baines life is the subject of this book, as we follow his life from childhood to old age. Like Chesil Beach, an early sexual experience defines Roland’s life. In this case, he is seduced by his piano teacher, and however privileged this makes him feel at the time, it scuttles his future a person of high intelligence and (seemingly) astounding skill and promise as a musician. His teacher, Miriam Cornell, enjoys her power over him; things come to a head with her plans to marry him in Scotland (he is about to enrol in A-levels) and Roland’s escape. Roland’s later marriage to the brilliant novelist Alissa Baines, née Eberhardt, comes to an equally abrupt end when she leaves him and their baby behind to pursue a solo life of writing in Germany. Alissa’s disappearance somewhat comically places Roland under investigation by the police; at this point he is a poet, and his journal includes the phrase ‘She must remain dead’ (referencing Miriam, his ‘horrible ghost’ [p. 24]).

The third (main) woman in Roland’s life is the Daphne. She and Peter were close friends of Roland and Alyssia in the days of their marriage, and a long friendship eventually leads on to love when Peter leaves Daphne. This relationship appears to be going well but ends and is only resurrected when Daphne’s health suffers a crisis.

Read this way, the novel is about an underachiever who passes through several relationships during a troubling period of history, from the Cuban Missile crisis (his youth) to the Pandemic (old age). McEwan’s protagonist engages with the events of his times intellectually, with one period during the Cold War when he did take some risks to smuggle records across the barricades into East Germany. His father was a military officer in Libya (post-war), meaning that part of his childhood was spent overseas; next came boarding school and his seduction by Miriam; then a life based in and around London as the decades pass. Roland’s life is told largely in chronological order, though chapters move between the near present (Alissa’s disappearance) and Roland’s childhood (with a focus on Miriam) in the first half of the novel. Afterwards, the layers of his life, Alyssia’s life, and others are unravelled through tales of their own childhoods and the lives of their parents. Roland’s own life moves forward through relationships with his adult son, Daphne, and retracing his steps to confront Miriam and Alissa.

This summary doesn’t do justice to the novel, but it gives a flavour, perhaps, of a novel about a man and his life. History happens around the man, but like the reader, he can only study it:

Enough! Those angry or disappointed gods in modern form, Hitler, Nasser, Khrushchev, Kennedy and Gorbachev may have shaped his life but that gave Roland no insight into international affairs. Who cared what an obscure Mr Baines of Lloyd Square thought about the future of the open society or the planet’s fate? He was powerless. On the table at his side was a postcard from Lawrence and Ingrid … Roland closed his eyes. Between himself and his son was an unresolved matter. No unfriendliness, but they needed to talk (p. 476)

The great illusion of fiction is to engage the reader in the life of a protagonist. By the slow layering of detail, McEwan creates a character whose life – however insignificant in historical terms within the fictional world of the novel – matters like ours matter. Few of us can turn the tide of history, but all of us need to ponder the meaning of our childhoods, our relationships, our choices and actions and make sense of things. Roland’s choice to burn his diaries with the details of his life would be tragic if it were true. It is true in the world of the text. The question then is, what will you do with your own diaries, your own memories, your own unresolved crises over a lifetime that is an imperfect as Roland’s and the next person. What lessons have you learned?

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