Lessons by Ian McEwan
When 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. 2,000 miles from his mother’s protective love, stranded at an unusual 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, leaving him alone with their baby son. He is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence. As the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
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From the Suez and Cuban Missile crises, 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. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means – literature, travel, friendship, drugs, sex and politics. A profound love is cut tragically short.
Then, in his final years, he finds love again in another form. His journey raises important questions. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past?
My Review
Some of the book – which is really Roland’s memoir – resonated with me, but being a few years younger, a lot of it didn’t. I was, however, fascinated by anti-Nazi group known as The White Rose as my mother living as a Jew in Vienna, had to flee the Nazis in 1938. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 for instance went over my head at the time as I was too young to understand the danger, and have only read about it as history. The Suez Crisis in 1956 happened when I was about three years old.
However, I went through Checkpoint Charlie in 1973 when I was a fashion student. I was about 20 years old. It is an experience I will never forget. I cannot understand how ANYONE could defend the GDR. It was awful and scary. They counted our English money on the way in and again on the way out to make sure we hadn’t given any to the residents of East Berlin to spend in the Western shops. We had to have receipts. Machine guns were pointed at us as we went through the checkpoint. In the Eastern shops they sold a lot of strong spirits (they no doubt needed it) but I best remember all the teddies were the same colour. How we celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Chernobyl was important to me and I remember being in hospital giving birth to my second child just after it happened. The woman in the next bed was terrified of the fall-out and had come to England from somewhere in Europe to have her baby. I am still affected by the man who stayed to feeds the cats and dogs after everyone left. And the children who would die of cancer in years to come and came here to the UK for a holiday.
But the most important part of the actual story follows young Roland from his early childhood in Tripoli where his father was stationed and he felt as if he had total freedom, to a somewhat ‘alternative’ boarding school in the Suffolk countryside. It is here that he meets his piano teacher Miriam Cornell when he is eleven years old. It changes his life, but it will be another three years until he is seduced by her and their ‘affair’ begins. By today’s’ standards, I found this all rather distasteful. It reminded me of a film I saw many years ago called Summer of ’42 . It tells the story of the author, in his early teens on his 1942 summer vacation, who embarks on a ‘romance’ with a young woman, whose husband has gone off to fight in the war. It seemed beautiful and poignant at the time, but in retrospect it’s all rather tacky and creepy.
The ‘affair’ with Miriam has an impact on Roland’s life and relationships. He doesn’t marry until he meets Alissa in the eighties. They have a child – Lawrence – but one day she just walks out, leaving him with a seven-month-old baby, Lawrence. We then delve into her family’s history – her mother Jane is English, but her father Heinrich is German. Eventually Alissa explains why she had to leave in order to write her books and become one of Germany’s most celebrated authors, but as a mother myself, I’m not buying it. She felt as though her marriage to Roland and motherhood were stifling her creativity, but she could have done both as numerous authors have shown us over the years.
There is so much more but if I go on my review will be nearly as long as the book! Roland muses about new Labour in power under Blair and then Brown, disillusionment, followed by years of disastrous Tory rule, Brexit and the pandemic.
Lessons is a fascinating look at the history of our times, wrapped around Roland’s story. It’s an ambitious book and one that only an author of McEwan’s talent and experience can pull off with such mastery.
Many thanks to @annecater for inviting me to be part of #RandomThingsTours
About the Author
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.
