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After a series of contemporary novels focusing on single issues Lessons sees McEwan return to the decade-hopping chronicle style of Atonement. Like that novel a formative sexual encounter casts a long shadow over a life: in this case restless drifter Roland, whose life we follow from a fifties childhood at the end of Empire to COVID and Brexit. We start somewhere in the middle, where Roland is trying to make sense of his wife Alissia’s sudden disappearance - the second defining moment of Roland’s life. From here we flash backwards to Roland’s teenage years at boarding school and the first: his growing fascination with music teacher Miriam who seduces him aged fourteen.
At times this novel can pin Roland’s life too neatly to the decades: sixties rebellion and travelling; flirtations with entrepreneurialism in the eighties and a comfortable circle of New Labour friends and families in the nineties. But it gathers momentum and intensity in its final third as Roland seeks confrontations with the teacher who abused him and with the wife who left him: both events that Roland turns over and over in his mind to try and construct a narrative of his life that fits. This is a baggy novel, at times meandering, and it’s fascinating to see a novelist whose work has been defined by tight control and style explore a much looser style of work. To return to the title, there are no easy Lessons to be drawn from these encounters.
At times this novel can pin Roland’s life too neatly to the decades: sixties rebellion and travelling; flirtations with entrepreneurialism in the eighties and a comfortable circle of New Labour friends and families in the nineties. But it gathers momentum and intensity in its final third as Roland seeks confrontations with the teacher who abused him and with the wife who left him: both events that Roland turns over and over in his mind to try and construct a narrative of his life that fits. This is a baggy novel, at times meandering, and it’s fascinating to see a novelist whose work has been defined by tight control and style explore a much looser style of work. To return to the title, there are no easy Lessons to be drawn from these encounters.