Dave's Book Blog: "Lessons" by Ian McEwan

Tuesday, 19 March 2024

"Lessons" by Ian McEwan

The typical McEwan novel starts with an inciting incident such as premature ejaculation, a balloon death, or betrayal, and traces the ramifications of that as they trickle down through the years. In this book, Roland the protagonist-narrator is touched and kissed by his (female) piano teacher when he is eleven years old; from there we discover the rest of his biography. But this time there is more complexity, which is, I suppose, why this is longer than the normal McEwan. Because, in a long life, many things impinge upon one and shape one's personality. Roland's childhood is in Libya, where his army father was stationed. His father bullies his mother. His mother has children from a previous marriage. Roland's first wife (like Doris Lessing) abandons him with a baby so that she can write novels, becoming Europe's foremost novelist. He survives with a portfolio of employments - pianist, poet and tennis coach - but his is unable to develop any one of his multiple talents to the point of expertise.

This is McEwan saying that the fall-out from sexual abuse (and by extension any single incident) is not that simple; this is McEwan saying that life is full of messy complexity. In time, Roland will be urged - by the police, by women who come to know of his story - to call the piano teacher to account but he knows that blame cannot be so easily apportioned. "His life had been altered. Some would say ruined. But was it really? She had given him joy." (Ch 9) That makes this perhaps the most mature thing that McEwan has ever written.

And yet it also makes the book less like a novel. Roland's life is a muddle and the narrative is muddled (and this is exacerbated by the frequent flash-backs and reminiscences). Expectations are set up which are not fulfilled. Judgements are withheld. The plot meanders and I spent a lot of time wondering where it was heading and what was the point of it all. And that is, I think, the point. Life is not like a work of art. Life's chaotic and you never can tell what effect those flapping butterfly's wings will have. As Roland realises in old age, as he reads through his diaries: "Reading back ... did not bring him any fresh understanding of his life. There were no obvious themes, no undercurrents he had not noticed at the time, nothing learned. A grand mass of detail was what he found and events." (Ch 12)

The book is also set against the backdrop of European politics since the second world war, hinging on the fall of the Berlin wall and tracking the rise and fall of social democracy. Another messy narrative.

Selected quotes:

"The bass clef coiled like the foetus of a rabbit in his biology book." (Ch 1)
"The self-made hell was an interesting construct. Nobody escaped making one, at least one, in a lifetime. Some lives were nothing but." (Ch 1)
"One-handedly he fetched a mop, filled a bucket and cleared up the mess, spreading it widely. This was how most messes were cleared up, smoothed thin to invisibility." (Ch 1)
"One day, the English teacher, Mr Clayton, came into the class and said, 'I want to talk to you boys about masturbation. ... I've only two words to say to you ... Enjoy it'." (Ch 2)
"Ah, the great consumer marketplace of self-realisation, whose lethal enemy was the selfishly mewling baby in league with the husband and his absurd requests. He had crushed ambitions of his own, had put in the nights and days with the neonate." (Ch 7)
"Some love affairs comfortably and sweetly rot." (Ch 8)
"How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events." (Ch 8)
"He had the splayed-leg swagger of a boy alive to fresh bulk between his legs." (Ch 9)
"He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement." (Ch 10)
"In forty-five languages she took up space in the minds of several million people." (Ch 10)
"He could not bring himself to sing a hymn. However sweet the melodies or the rhythm of the lines he could not get past the embarrassment of their blatant or childish untruths." (Ch 10)

This is a hugely autobiographical novel and consequently much more complex than much or McEwan's earlier stuff. It's not a quick and easy read, but it teaches some important lessons about life. Possibly McEwan's masterpiece.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling

and The Kids of God

Extras:

McEwan wrote an introduction to The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider and the way he describes the divided city of Berlin has resonances with that book.

McEwan's early life was following the postings of his Army major father. He was educated from the age of eleven in a boarding school in Suffolk; he claims the English teacher is a real person but that the piano teacher did not exist.

McEwan did discover, fifty years afterwards, that his mum and dad had a brother during the second world war (while his mum was married to another man) who was given up for adoption.

Roland is really very well read. Among the authors he has enjoyed are: Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day), Jack Kerouac (On the Road, Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Lonesome Traveller, Pic, The Dharma Bums), Hermann Hesse (Demian, Steppenwolf), Albert Camus (The Outsider, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague), Michael Moorcock (The Whispering Swarm), J G Ballard (Crash, Empire of the Sun, Cocaine Nights, High Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, Millennium People)William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, The Ticket that Exploded, The Place of Dead Roads, The Wild Boys, The Soft Machine), Henry Green , Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier, Last Post, A Man Could Stand Up, No More Parades, Some Do Not ...), Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square, The Plains of Cement, The Siege of Pleasure, The Midnight Bell), Olivia Manning.