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nadia_ligda 's review for:
Lessons
by Ian McEwan
Unlike many of us, who, during the Covid lockdowns, did not venture beyond making bread and taking out the yoga mat, Ian McEwan wrote his 17th novel. As he comments in the accompanying note, there are many autobiographical elements, including his family history, and the timeline that his main character treads matches exactly his own. However, apart from being a family saga spanning 7+ decades it is also an account of many major political and socioeconomic events and changes as they have been experienced by him, his contemporaries and even his parents generation.
Liking an author is obviously a subjective matter and not all works need to be equally appealing. So, to the point for this book. Written in three parts, representing roughly the main character's adolescence, middle and old age, there are sections, especially in the third part, that I found reflective and thoughtful and simply brilliant, and just about enough to justify my 4 (and not 3) stars. The narrative is not linear at all, going back and forth in time. This however, is not a superficial creative construct to tell the story but rather a means for the main character to revisit events and retrieve memories and look at his life from different perspectives, which I thought worked very well. The problem for me was large sections referring to events that either had nothing to do with the main character or were detailed to such extent that detracted from the main story. As much as I appreciate, and I think I understand, the intention of describing one's life (and "lessons learned") within the environment and everything else that takes place, lack of focus, especially in the first part of the book made me wonder where this was going .... and for a 500page book this is not a good feeling.
Some final random thoughts: A strange choice to have two pivotal female characters, which McEwan clarifies that are fictional, as
(a) a clearly disturbed young woman in her early twenties, a teacher in a boarding school, who sexually abuses a child and
(b) a darker and angrier version of a Doris Lessing character who writes about people but cannot love or show compassion for anyone, not even her child.
Liking an author is obviously a subjective matter and not all works need to be equally appealing. So, to the point for this book. Written in three parts, representing roughly the main character's adolescence, middle and old age, there are sections, especially in the third part, that I found reflective and thoughtful and simply brilliant, and just about enough to justify my 4 (and not 3) stars. The narrative is not linear at all, going back and forth in time. This however, is not a superficial creative construct to tell the story but rather a means for the main character to revisit events and retrieve memories and look at his life from different perspectives, which I thought worked very well. The problem for me was large sections referring to events that either had nothing to do with the main character or were detailed to such extent that detracted from the main story. As much as I appreciate, and I think I understand, the intention of describing one's life (and "lessons learned") within the environment and everything else that takes place, lack of focus, especially in the first part of the book made me wonder where this was going .... and for a 500page book this is not a good feeling.
Some final random thoughts: A strange choice to have two pivotal female characters, which McEwan clarifies that are fictional, as
(a) a clearly disturbed young woman in her early twenties, a teacher in a boarding school, who sexually abuses a child and
(b) a darker and angrier version of a Doris Lessing character who writes about people but cannot love or show compassion for anyone, not even her child.