Lessons

I started reading McEwan without expecting any great surprises. He is a writer to whom I have devoted 20 years of worship and who has almost never disappointed my expectations. But this time he has outdone himself by bravely tackling some themes that have become intractable thanks to the intellectual conformism of progressive Anglo-European culture. The two themes are sexual abuse and creative narcissism. McEwan very courageously overturns and empties conformism by bringing the ‘abstract’ and thus ideological themes back to their simple but profound nature as human affairs, treating them with honesty and compassion to turn them into stories… show more.

The emotions probed and explored in this book lie at the root of our most basic anxieties, uncertainties and bewilderment. There is, too, a long section which speaks of the clandestine resistance to the Nazis within Germany which I found particularly enthralling, being someone who greatly admires the courage and action of Sophie Scholl and Die Weisse Rose. There is an audacity about Lessons which I admire, a capacity to cut to the bone and McEwan delivers a particularly devastating denunciation of the crippling effect on learning, scholarship and culture made by the long dominance of civilisation by Christian… show more.

Lessons covers more than seventy years in the life of Roland Baines, a man of great potential who never seems to amount to much. 

Roland isn’t a striver and a doer; he’s someone to whom things happen. Some of those things are deeply personal, and some — the Cuban missile crisis, Chornobyl, COVID — happened to everyone.

McEwan performs this mingling of the micro and the macro with his usual effortless grace. The great formative experience of Roland’s school days was a long affair with Miss Cornell, his disturbed piano teacher.

It’s fascinating to watch him realize that the experience… show more.

I’ve loved most of MacEwan’s books over the years, so I was delighted when a new one appeared and undaunted by its size (close to 500 pages). And it has a fabulous jacket; I’m always influenced by the jacket (book designers take note!).

It starts with the adolescence of the protagonist, Roland (my people, I thought once again), and the incident (okay, spoiler: sexual abuse) that propels him through his life… and the book’s plot.

The plot! Why do people make these decisions? I found myself thinking as first, Roland, and then later, his wife, make choices that had… show more.

I’m not the jealous type, but as a fiction writer, I have to admit that Ian McEwan’s habit of producing masterpiece after masterpiece has the potential to become tiresome.

Nonetheless, I have to report that he’s done it again: his latest novel, Lessons, is the well-written story of a man who had a sexual relationship with his female piano teacher while he was a lonely teen marooned at boarding school, a relationship he thought was genuine romantic love.

The narrative takes us through his life in 1980s Britain and Germany, chronicling all the political turmoil of that era. It… show more.

This book is a saga, in that it covers a wide swath of historical time – a time span exactly in relation to the life of one human being. Perhaps part of the reason I was drawn to it is that the time frame is similar to my own. I understood the politics and knew of the players.

But what I really loved was the way that the central character, Roland, doesn’t see things. He lives his life without understanding his life or the choices he is making. He can’t see beyond the immediacy of his moment. But as… show more.

I fell off the Ewan McEwan wagon for several years. 

Why? His sentences are gorgeous and impeccable but sometimes his plots seemed glitchy to me or his research was too in your face. But, Lessons! It’s one of those books that has so much of the world in it, while at the same time the characters are deep, vivid, flawed (yes, indeed), and the scenes intense and unforgettable. 

The clarity of his thinking and his understanding of politics, the eras we’ve lived through, the confusion of emotions we suffer from, and the way people fail each other as well… show more.