As you would expect with Ian McEwan this is beautiful to read and with memorable characters who are full of intrigue. The lead character Roland Baines is a good man who does not necessarily make the best decisions in his life but is devoted to his son. The story is broad, incorporating many facets of recent history including an element of Nazi resistance. It is a delightful book which I did not want to finish and is up there with The Comfort of Strangers, Saturday, The Innocents and Amsterdam which I consider his best. Then again, all his books are a great read.

You can ‘learn your lessons’ which is good, or you can be ‘taught’ them which is sometimes okay and, sometimes, very painful. In the short term, you may not know which kind of lesson you’re actually stuck in! The lessons for Roland Baines, in Ian McEwan’s latest novel, start with a paedophiliac encounter between an eleven year old boy and a woman piano teacher, and they continue throughout his life and into old age in different situations and with different people. Lessons, like the first one, can have lifetime negative consequences, lead you into complete misunderstandings about what you did or what you should have learned, and take, literally, a lifetime to understand. Just to make this extra confusing, this isn’t just a novel. It’s also part biography and autobiography, a commentary on the second half of the 20th century and it asks to be read as fiction although we all know it isn’t. At the start of the book, Roland, in his 30s, has just been deserted by his wife and is looking back on his childhood and his early schooling at a private school on the Shotley peninsular near Ipswich. WH Auden would have understood the connections as to what your parents did and didn’t do while the music teacher, quite literally, f***ed Roland up. Just to add to the mix, the deserting wife eventually has her own story to tell about Roland which echoes with the way that Ian McEwan roots about in his own relationships and situations as he writes. I seem to remember that an ex-wife of his complained about being restrained by legal injunctions from talking about their relationship while he could churn events from the marriage through his novels. If that’s the case, the boot is – eventually – on the other foot here! It all makes for a fascinating read. As an adult, Roland could easily be described as an underachiever but the reasons why someone might say that are complex and shifting. Things people did and said in their early lives come back to bite them in multiple presents but, when you forget the metaphysics, there’s an extraordinary picture of a real life not lived to the full, if anyone could work out what full might mean! I was born six weeks after Ian McEwan, I went to grammar school while he went private but the feelings of loneliness, the discipline and the bullying resonate, as do the events like the Cuban missile crisis and, later, the collapse of the Iron Curtain which provide the temporal and cultural framework for the novel. It makes the narrative even more compelling! It also has to be said how well-controlled and how well written the narrative is. There’s a bit of a sense of tying up loose ends in the last few chapters and finding out a bit more about what people really felt back then but, of course, even that is deceptive. Hindsight is a good form of self-justification! It’s a great read. I couldn’t help but wonder whether, in the earliest drafts, the music teacher with the wandering hands might have been male. Arguably, it would not make much difference to the damage which stemmed from that event but, perhaps, it would have been more realistic. You can make up your own mind about that! (Lessons is published by Jonathan Cape. Thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for a fair review.)

Sometimes you stumble into a circle of light so bright that you wonder how you missed it all those years. Reading Ian McEwan was one of those moments. Of course I knew he existed and wrote things, but I never picked one up, for no particular reason. So it was that I opened this and discovered what I had been missing. He writes like a God, with all the carefree ease of one who has laboured immensely hard on every sentence. It is beautiful prose. As important as the prose, is that the narrative structure is also flawless. The story flows along on its merry way with confidence and verve. It is clear eyed and kind, always staying just the right side of sentimentality. A book you will nag people to read - I wish someone had nagged me to read McEwan years ago.

A fascinating history of the last 100 years from the perspective of one man. The descriptions of boarding school and then looking after his baby son after his wife has left give the book a really strong opening. Parts did seem to ramble a little afterwards but this is a masterful and compassionate view of humanity and how events much bigger than an individual shape a life.

Lessons clocks in at a mere 483 pages and by the time you complete it, you’ll feel like you’ve lived a lifetime. That is not intended as a criticism, rather a comment on McEwan’s flair for weaving a personal narrative through the rich tapestry of the 20th and 21st centuries. The novel begins with the young protagonist, Roland, nervously taking piano lessons at his boarding school and from that position of innocence, we travel both backwards and forwards through the formative experiences of both Roland, his parents, his future wives, their children, friends, colleagues and lovers. The historical events of the current and previous centuries loom large, the social mores of the time captured beautifully, all the way up to the most recent pandemic. Lessons oozes class and is well worth the effort - it took me most of January to complete!