Ian McEwan's Lessons pay a tribute to the simple joys of love, family and complicated intimacies, writes Andrea Nagel
Lessons ★★★ Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape
The amount of enjoyment you get from reading Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons, depends on what kind of experience you’re after. If you’re looking for high drama and thrills, look elsewhere. If you want plot twists and surprise endings, this isn't for you. If you want a parable on how people should live their lives — as the title might imply — you won’t get that.
Lessons is a story about a mediocre Englishman. Failed poet and writer, failed pianist and a failure in his romantic relationships, Roland Bains lives an unexceptional life. As a young boarding school pupil, he is groomed by his piano teacher to provide her with sex and an intimate relationship ensues. The novel begins with a description of a schoolboy’s erotic fantasy. The teacher is strict and stern — physically punishing him with pinches on his upper thigh that leave a dark bruise under his school shorts — but she also promises the fulfilment of his immature carnal desires. He is 14, Miss Cornell is 25. How much this experience affects his life is left open to the interpretation of the reader, but when he gets the chance, as an old man, to report her to the authorities, he confronts her, demands an explanation but questions himself about his complicity in the affair and can’t go ahead with the charges.
From the moment Roland shows up at his piano teacher’s cottage door, at her instruction, the voluntary handing over of his agency has a profound effect on him. He struggles to assert himself, has a hard time making decisions, lacks ambition to make the most of his talents and dithers through life while the female characters in the novel are strong, driven and self assured. Would Roland have been this kind of man regardless of the domineering nature of his early sexual awakening? The novel asks the reader to decide. Throughout his life, Roland struggles to define his relationship with the piano teacher. His memory, intentions and desires are unreliable. He keeps the encounters secret for most of his life, sharing them only with the two women he gets close to, but he cannot define “the nature of the harm”.
Despite the vague way in which McEwan deals with his character’s feelings about the underage sexual abuse, it is indisputable that Roland is abandoned by his wife, Alissa, atop caring for their baby son, who she refuses to have contact with. They reconcile briefly, for a few hours, at the end of their lives and the reader must decide which has had the most fulfilling existence. Contrasted with his dithering and lack of ambition, Alissa is the ultimate decisionmaker. She is willing to sacrifice every relationship in the pursuit of her talent and craft. As a foil to Roland’s entropy — he will “drift through an unchosen life” — Alissa becomes the greatest German writer of her age and is lauded around the world for her brilliant books. Even Roland cannot deny her brilliance and she understands that her son and husband are the high cost of her undivided attention to her work and her critical success.
The action takes place against the backdrop of postwar Britain and the story is infused by the effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling wall to the storming of the American Capitol?” the book asks. Roland’s passivity seems to be the answer. As The Guardian review succinctly puts it, “Roland is never quite impelled to do anything; he’s complicit in his complacency”.
But the novel isn’t full of despair at its main character’s lack of action. Roland’s story is frustrating, but it’s not sad. Early on he finds the will to leave the piano teacher — who had made him her love slave and demanded that they get married. Miss Cornell wants to have Roland firmly under her control but he manages to escape. Alissa disappears from his life but he develops a strong, lifelong bond with his son which brings him invaluable joy. He finally finds real love with his best friend Daphne as she discovers that she is dying of cancer. In her strength he learns lessons that will sustain him into his old age.
Through Roland, McEwan pays tribute to the simple joys of love, family and complicated intimacies. It is a story of a life so unexceptional, so gormless, so passive as to be almost meaningless and negligible, except for the lessons that Roland learns from the women in his life. What will he take to his grave? The last bit of advice Roland gets is from his beloved granddaughter, who reminds him: “A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.”
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