Roland is eleven, sent away by his parents to boarding school (his father, the Captain, had them stationed in Lybia with the army) is kissed and fondled by his piano teacher, a woman a decade older who wears a seductive perfume.
The problem is, though I think I probably like McEwan, I don’t like Roland at all. McEwan/Roland is intelligent, left-wing and an interesting political commentator. Ian McEwan covers all the big political issues of those years through Roland’s eyes, from war-damaged parents and Arab nationalism to the threat of nuclear destruction, the Gorbachev years and the end of the cold war, women’s liberation, Thatcher, Major, and then Blair’s Britain (remember that huge positivity that the world was, finally, coming right?), and on to financial crises, corporate greed, global warming and covid. Our narrator, Roland, is a decade-and-a-half older than me so what happened in his formative years went on to form me. There’s no doubt this is a huge book, a deep immersion into an Englishman’s life from childhood to old age. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means ¬- literature, travel, friendship, drugs, politics, sex and love.So continues my love/meh relationship with Ian McEwan. Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.įrom the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. 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. 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. Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers.
Discover the Sunday Times bestselling new novel from Ian McEwan.
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