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.)
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