Blog Tour Review: Lessons – Ian McEwan

I received this book from the publisher.

About The Book

While 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. Stranded at 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, and he is left alone with their baby son. Her disappearance sparks a journey of discovery that will continue for decades, as Roland confronts the reality of his rootless existence and attempts to embrace the uncertainty – and freedom – of his future.

My Review

I’m a great admirer of Ian McEwan’s books and I am steadily working my through his novels, and so was looking forward to Lessons, his newest. This is a sprawling read which takes the reader from the post World War 2 years, to the present day, following the life of Roland Baines from his teenage years to a man in his sunset years. It is at times sentimental and at others compassionate, and is an intense look at what makes a life, and it’s many peaks and troughs.

We first meet Roland as a boy, brought back to England from Libya by his parents. The family have been living there after his father, a Captain in the Army was stationed there at the end of the Second World War. It has been decided by the Captain that Roland will attend a boarding school and he and his wife, Rosalind, will return to Libya. For Roland, life in an English boarding school is vastly different to the life he had in Libya. Swapping visits to the beach and hunting for Scorpions with the rules and regulations of a boys school is a culture shock, and he feels lost and abandoned.

Twenty five years later in the mid eighties we meet Roland again. This time he is a new father, holding his baby son, Lawrence in the kitchen of the house he and his wife Alissa bought. But Alissa has left him. He has awoken to a note from her, apologising but saying that it is for the best. Alerting the police to her disappearance the finger of suspicion soon falls on him, because what sort of mother would leave her newborn son?

Moving between these two time periods and beyond, the reader becomes deeply acquainted with Roland, an indecisive and idealistic man, whose promise at school never truly asserts itself. Set against a backdrop of key historical moments; the fall of the Berlin Wall, life under Margaret Thatcher, New Labour and the fall of the Twin Towers, Lessons is a wholly expansive novel. These events, for the most part don’t take centre stage, but they do provide a contrast and context for the life that Roland is living at that time. He flourishes under Thatcherism, but this rails against his extreme left beliefs, and his visits to East Berlin with contraband expose his tendency for risk.

Against these large events are quieter, simpler moments. Moments that show the fragility of life, of family and of love. Through Ronald, McEwan shows a man who has been given all the benefits of being born in the boomer generation, and hasn’t squandered it as such, but hasn’t realised his luck. This is a man who is looking back on his life, picking up pivotal moments and examining them, realising that distance and time can change your viewpoint of things.

At its core, Lessons is a tale of family. Roland’s life with Lawrence isn’t traditional, he is a single father with a wife who has moved abroad and has no contact with either her husband or her son. There are beautifully depicted moments of fatherhood, and McEwan creates a loving, warm world of great affection and joy. There are emotional and difficult passages of loss and of the realisation that there is more time behind you than there is ahead of you, with moments of great poignancy.

Some of the important moments of Roland’s life are depicted in great detail, and there is one storyline in particular which some readers may find upsetting, whilst others happen almost off page. It is a chunky book, coming in at around 500 pages, but I would have liked more. It took me a while to get into Lessons, but then something clicked and I was in love. I love a book that I can lost in, and this was certainly that.

About The Author

Ian McEwan

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.