Instead of an prize winning author, a man so lacking in confidence from childhood issues that he, with all his gifts, is unable to form a perfect relationship or play in concert hall or win Wimbledon or write a Booker prize winner. His ‘there but for the grace of God’ alter ego. I’m wondering if this character is McEwan himself, but with added unresolved issues that prevent him becoming the successful man he is.

He’s a very talented pianist (thank you, seductress music teacher), a writer, pro tennis player, sensitive, highly intelligent. He is always searching for those happy days when he was waiting to be evacuated from a camp with other army kids and they were left to run wild for a week or so, all friends together and no responsibility. Unfortunately, Roland doesn’t learn any lessons. Sexual confusion, possession, abandonment these are traumatic. Yes, we could all take lessons from childhood and learn from them. A husband and child would cramp her style, she says and tells him not to look for her. He learns other lessons from his parents, the way a mother can abandon a child to keep a marriage or hide a secret, and also from his wife, who vanishes in the second chapter leaving Roland to raise their child alone. This is the most obvious lesson in this Book of Lessons, and we see his self-destructive life path in the aftermath of this abuse. He is confused and awakened and a few years after the lessons cease he goes willingly, seeking her out, desperate to have sex before the world ends in nuclear destruction. 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. So continues my love/meh relationship with Ian McEwan.

Review lessons ian mcewan