It’s the beginning of an all-consuming and manipulative sexual relationship, which results in Miss Cornell locking Roland in her cottage and refusing to let him wear anything but the carefully ironed pyjamas she has bought him, causing him to fail most of his O-levels.Īs Roland tries to navigate his life without any formal qualifications, the 20th century unspools. Science and Technical Research and Development.

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In theory, Roland is more fortunate than his parents, who were shaped by the Second World War, and his son, who will later find himself priced out of the housing market and working to tackle climate change. Like McEwan, he attends a state-run boarding school, where the social mix gives him a certain classlessness. Roland is a baby boomer, part of a generation “who had the historical luck and all the chances”, and “lolled on history’s aproned lap, nestling in a little fold in time, eating all the cream”. The man at its centre is Roland Baines, who bears a strong resemblance to McEwan, were McEwan not a hugely successful novelist. McEwan has typically been a 600-words-a-day craftsman Lessons, written over three lockdowns, has a looser beat – much like the jazz its piano-playing protagonist so enjoys. A “meditation” on the way that global events penetrate and shape the life of a man and those around him, it is baggier and more protean than anything the author has written before, sacrificing polish in favour of swing. It smells like an Ian McEwan novel too, with all the moral dilemmas, cataclysmic events, withheld narratives, comic encounters and dinner-party discourse we have come to expect from the author of Atonement, Saturday and Amsterdam.Īnd yet this intimate but sprawling story about an ordinary man’s reckoning with existence does not resemble the lean, controlled enquiries of McEwan’s past fiction. It features a protagonist who was born in 1948, in the same circumstances as its author and it homes in on moments familiar from his past novels: 1950s postwar Germany ( The Innocent) the thermonuclear-sexual threat of 1962 ( On Chesil Beach) the Thatcherite 1980s ( The Child in Time).

Lessons by ian mcewan review