Lessons

LoveReading Says

Against landscapes of social and political upheavals through the 20th-century to the present day, Ian McEwan’s Lessons explores how the past impacts and directs our presents and futures through the lens of a man’s complex, exhaustively detailed life.

Perhaps reflecting the protagonist’s rootless, stifled character, there’s something detached about the writing even as the author recounts intimate and emotional events, making Lessons an introspective novel that reflects on life’s “if onlys” and “what ifs” - all those missed opportunities, and passively taken paths.

At boarding school, fresh from his military family moving to England from Libya in 1959, Roland Baines is abused by his piano teacher, a relationship that marks him through his teenage years and beyond. Indeed, this relationship dictates how Roland connects with women throughout his life. We meet him again in 1986, when his wife has vanished, leaving him with their baby son as the Chernobyl disaster strikes. Some three years later, she still hasn’t returned.

In the meantime, we’re presented with exhaustive detail on his wife’s family history and their relationship history, as played out in a swiftly changing world that extends to the future (9/11, Brexit and COVID) as well as the past (the anti-Nazi White Rose movement, Suez Crisis, and Cuban Missile Crisis, through to the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall).

Shining a scrutinising light on the author’s post-war generation, Lessons paints a detailed and often melancholic portrait of a man’s “drift through an unchosen life”, perhaps issuing the lesson that personal inaction and indecision cannot be blamed on external factors.

Joanne Owen

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