Lessons - Ian McEwan

The accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell—a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife—was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.

 

Lessons tells the epic story of seventy- year old Roland Baines, with his own mundane life set against various historical backdrops: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chernobyl disaster, Brexit and the pandemic. The book opens with his wife Alissa's sudden and unexplained disappearance, leaving Roland  their infant son, Lawrence behind. At first the police suspect Roland of being the architect of his wife's vanishing into thin air but eventually we learn that Alissa has reasons for abandoning her family and she eventually becomes an acclaimed novelist.

The story skips back and forth through Roland's life and we are introduced to his family and friends. His father was an emotionally distant military officer who bullied Roland's mother. They lived together in Libya when Roland was a young child. There were two half-siblings who were raised by his mother's family. At the age of eleven Roland was sent off to England to attend boarding school. He is a gifted pianist and is lured into a sexual relationship by his music teacher, Miriam, a woman in her mid-twenties.  Roland eventually bails when he realizes that Miriam is mad and he leaves school at just sixteen years old, despite having the aptitude to go on to university. The trauma resulting from Miriam's actions endures and Roland spends a lifetime trying to unravel its effects. A chronic underachiever, he drifts through various careers over the course of his life, writing text for greeting cards, teaching tennis, playing piano in a hotel tearoom. He marries Daphne, who has three children of her own and the blended family they create is a successful one, warm and inclusive. Roland grows old, he has grandchildren, he becomes fat and loses his hair, friends and family die.

This book, McEwan's longest, meanders through a man's mostly unremarkable life from the postwar decade to the present day, occasionally taking an unexpected turn. The pace is unhurried but the passing of time is marked by key global events. McEwan has transformed an ordinary life into an extraordinary novel about human complexity and resilience.