The jokes began in March 2020: what would come first, a vaccine or Ian McEwan’s pandemic novel? His reputation for topical fiction, hardly an obvious destination when he first broke out in the 1970s with grisly tales of incest, bestiality and paedophilia, owes everything to Saturday (2005), which mulled the pros and cons of invading Iraq through the eyes of a bouillabaisse-simmering neurosurgeon in London: a strenuous yoking of spheres that spoke of nothing so much as the pressure McEwan felt to catch the moment, especially since the book’s acknowledgments made clear he’d been shadowing a brain doctor long before the events the book portrayed.
Signs that McEwan was wearing his mantle more lightly – with a counterfactual history of modern Britain told as a love triangle involving a robot (Machines Like Me) and a Brexit-era satire about an insectoid PM (The Cockroach), not to mention a novel written from the point of view of a foetus (Nutshell) – are dispelled by the arrival of his longest novel yet. Lessons covers eight decades in the life of Roland, a twice-married tearoom pianist at “a second-rank London hotel”. From his postwar military childhood in Libya (not the only detail he shares with his author) through the Thatcher years, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Blair, 9/11, Brexit and, yes, Covid; from schoolboy masturbation to arthritic widowhood; from the hard yards of childcare to the pang of the empty nest, the everyday milestones of Roland’s life tick by to the inescapable rhythm of the headlines: “How could he complain... when his son [Lawrence] was not at risk from smallpox or polio, or from snipers hidden in the hills above Sarajevo?”
It opens in May 1986, when Lawrence is a baby and Roland, 37, is busy sealing up his London home in the wake of the news from Chernobyl, which stirs unwelcome memories of how, at 14, the Cuban missile crisis led him into the bed of his sinister piano teacher, Miriam – a terror right out of McEwan’s early tales and in whose presence the book snaps to life. The psychosexual crisis she provokes – the novel’s radioactive core – puts much-needed heat under an otherwise scrappy soup that rather whiffs of possibly autobiographical projects abandoned and repurposed; like McEwan, Roland is sent to boarding school in Suffolk by a violent army father and learns of his older brother only in adulthood – matters of record, which McEwan has spoken of before, plundered right down to the wording of the advert by which that child was given up for adoption as a baby.
But instead of becoming a writer, Roland is a failed poet who, when, the book opens, has just been ditched by his wife, Alissa, soon to be a world-famous novelist who achieves publication only at the cost of abandoning her child to start afresh in her native Germany, where her father was on the fringe of the anti-Nazi White Rose movement, a thread that inspires much musing about Roland’s “fortune... to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928”.
