Having found “Machines Like Me” rather sterile, this one has more life in it, I felt. As others have noted, it does go on a bit - especially about the contemporary events that form the backdrop to the life of the central character (effectively from beginning to end). In particular, I didn’t feel that I wanted to be invited to any of Roland’s dinner parties as they all seemed to be dominated by tedious political discussions. However, the core of the story, the cast of characters and the insights into Roland’s inner life are mostly engaging, even if sometimes implausible. And of course the writing is lovely. Worth a read.

When his wife suddenly up and leaves him and his infant son, Roland Baines is troubled by his past. Facing single-parenthood and suspicion over his wife’s disappearance, Roland processes childhood trauma and learns to live in an tumultuous and ever-changing world. Roland is an imperfect character, and he is not alone in this narrative. I struggled to understand some of the characters’ choices and I found myself losing concentration with the slow pace. Nonetheless, it is beautifully and carefully written and I found the insertion of key historical events help the reader to understand the social attitude of the times and empathise with the characters. Ian McEwan once again successfully delivers insight into the complexity of humanity and growing up.

Guau!!!

Lessons is the eighteenth novel by Booker prize-winning British author, Ian McEwan. At the age of eleven, after living for five years with his parents in Libya, Roland Baines is sent to Berners Hall, a boarding school in rural Suffolk, to get the education his parents missed out on. His father had always wanted to play the piano: Roland is signed up for lessons with Miss Miriam Cornell. When Roland is thirty-seven, his wife abandons him and their baby son, claiming in a note that, while she loves him, motherhood would sink her, and she’s been living the “wrong life”. Now a published poet, Roland has to seek social service assistance as sole carer for seven-month-old Lawrence. As he copes with sole parenthood and the threat of a radiation cloud from Chernobyl, he is also under suspicion for murder from DI Douglas Browne, who is sceptical of the note and postcards Alissa has sent. Plagued by sleeplessness, Roland’s mind goes back to his childhood: army accommodation in Tripoli, boarding school, lessons with Miss Cornell, and the highly inappropriate affair into which she grooms a pre-teen boy. While the prospect of an older, attractive, single and erotically-inclined lover might be a dream come true for a randy sixteen-year-old schoolboy, even bedazzled, Roland understands it could be the destruction of his future. In eventually rejecting her, he also abandons his formal education, spends a rather dissolute decade travelling, then begins to educate himself. By his mid-forties, he is coaching tennis, writing reviews and playing tearoom piano. “How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.” Some of McEwan’s descriptive prose is exquisite: “He knew that her mind was elsewhere and that he bored her with his insignificance – another inky boy in a boarding school. His fingers were pressing down on the tuneless keys. He could see the bad place on the page before he reached it, it was happening before it happened, the mistake was coming towards him, arms outstretched like a mother, ready to scoop him up, always the same mistake coming to collect him without the promise of a kiss. And so it happened. His thumb had its own life. Together, they listened to the bad notes fade into the hissing silence.” But, at times, he seems to go off on tangents from his main plot, and although patience with these apparent digressions does offer the reader a fuller backstory, his lofty prose and cerebral subject matter can be enough to make the ordinary reader feel uneducated, even dumb. His protagonist is not all that likeable, making it hard for the reader to care a whole lot about his fate until, in the final pages, he develops into a more appealing character. With references to national, European and world events, McEwan certainly establishes the era and setting, but his protagonist’s opinions on, and reactions to, politics and current affairs do begin to bore, and readers will be tempted to skim. A too-detailed description of a mediocre life that is much wordier than it needs to be. This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and the publisher.

They say that you should ‘write about what you know’ don’t they? They, being largely people who don’t write. Certainly, it is very frustrating when descriptions are sketchy and unforgiveable when ‘truisms’ are proved to be incorrect. In a world with so much information at our fingertips – if our brains haven’t already absorbed it from all the media touchpoints which we now encounter every second of the day – it is so easy to check facts before those handy online proofreaders suggest grammatical changes. I have read most of Ian McEwan’s novels, usually held in awe by his outstanding prose and mesmerised by the often-forensic detail into which he goes to draw his characters, their locations, and their actions. Lessons takes us through the life learnings of Roland Baines, from his upbringing in North Africa through an intimate yet also rather existential boarding school encounter with a piano teacher, a doomed marriage to a German writer, a second marriage to an old friend – also doomed – and on to a prospective ending where his granddaughter can still teach him a thing or two. These are the bare bones of it and, yes, they really are bare, aren’t they? The words do not do justice to the memoir that absorbs us and carries us along, backwards and forwards against a background of world events I can relate to almost entirely, the timed bookends of this life story being very close to my own. We learn about desire, but also abuse, Friendship but also selfishness. The joy of a son – Lawrence – who is as rootless as his father. Yes, all of life is in here and as we read about Roland’s lessons, so we understand him better – always relating back to the classical pianist he might have been; the person he might have developed into and the life he might have led instead of this one. Would that have been so absorbing though? Would we have willed him on in the same way, felt his regret and his lack of self-fulfilment? Of course not. This is a book of what might have been; a life in which learning lessons may not lead to the passing of any exams. But, thankfully, it’s never too late to try. McEwan has certainly done his research, fed it into the process diagram at the top and converted it into a wealth of wealthy words. Almost too many words. There were times in the book when I wanted to say out loud ‘Ian (not Roland) I hear you. I know that you know what you know.’ I would have once found it intimidating to be faced by such a web of sophistication, but I was drawn into it willingly and captivated by it. The story worked but could have been much shorter and still been just as effective. My favourite of his remains On Chesil Beach for its simple and tragic beauty. I do wonder if sometimes authors no longer trust to such simple devices to be effective and need to embellish their reputations as much as their stories. Ian McEwan certainly has no need to do this as one of the outstanding conveyors of time and place in a generation. Having said all of this, if you’re not prepared to go on life’s long journey, your own story may be all the shorter, physically and philosophically , for it.