This was insomniac memory, not a dream. It was the piano lesson again — an orange-tiled floor, one high window, a new upright in a bare room close to the sickbay. He was eleven years old, attempting what others might know as Bach’s first prelude from Book One of The Well-tempered Clavier, simplified version, but he knew nothing of that. He didn’t wonder whether it was famous or obscure. It had no when or where. He could not conceive that someone had once troubled to write it. The music was simply here, a school thing, or dark, like a pine forest in winter, exclusive to him, his private labyrinth of cold sorrow. It would never let him leave.
Lessons is an epic of the British white male Baby Boomer experience, from a postwar military base-hopping childhood to solitary COVID-19 lockdowns in old age. The protagonist Roland Baines — for whom author Ian McEwan admits he “raided bits of (his) own life” for the first time — is a bit of a loser in middle age as the novel opens (his wife has just left him and their infant son; Roland can’t commit to a career beyond a bit of lounge piano playing here, some tennis lessons or freelance journalism there), but as he considers his life and we get to revisit his childhood (and watch him age), it becomes clear that some early trauma “rewired” him for life, setting Roland drifting helplessly against the great tides of historical events. This is a very British novel — from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Brexit, Roland and his friends discuss world events through the lens of their party politics — but Roland himself is a very relatable and sympathetic character: the good-hearted, rational everyman who witnesses and comments on the big and small events of his generation. From the big look at history to the details of Roland’s own journey through it, this is a masterful and valuable novel; perhaps the lasting word on this particular type of (the British white male of a certain class) Boomer experience. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The past, the modern past, was a weight, a burden of piled rubble, forgotten grief. But the weight on him was at one remove. It barely weighed at all. The accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell — a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife — was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.
There’s too much in Lessons to go over the details, but I did particularly like that Roland’s wife left him to become an award-winning novelist. Roland himself (an autodidact who left school at sixteen but filled his adulthood with improving reads) at one point expresses an impatience for the novelists of his time (They busied themselves with social surfaces, with sardonic depictions of class difference. In their lightweight tales, the greatest tragedy was a rumbled affair, or a divorce. None but a very few seemed much bothered by poverty, nuclear weapons, the Holocaust or the future of humankind or even the shrinking beauty of the countryside under the onslaught of modern farming.) But eventually, Roland became “more generous” and “less stupid” in his estimation of these writers (A tweed jacket never stopped anyone from writing well. He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement.) Between this evolution of thought and Roland’s perceptive readings of his ex-wife’s work, it felt like McEwan was giving an insider’s view of the novelist’s art, and perhaps, the evolution of his own estimation of his peers’ work. And I liked all of those bits very much.
The vile childhoods of others were not only a comfort to many but a means of emotional exploration, and an expression of what everyone knew but needed to keep on hearing: our beginnings shape us and must be faced.
Much is made of various characters’ childhoods and the trauma they suffered there (in particular, Roland was “rewired” by circumstances related to his piano lessons: all of his life unspools inevitably from this point), but the title also refers to the bigger events of history and what lessons we ought to, but often fail, to collectively learn from them:
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? He had thought 1989 was a portal, a wide opening to the future, with everyone streaming through. It was merely a peak. Now, from Jerusalem to New Mexico, walls were going up. So many lessons unlearned. The January assault on the Capitol could be merely a trough, a singular moment of shame to be discussed in wonder for years. Or a portal to a new kind of America, the present administration just an interregnum, a variant of Weimar. Meet me on the Avenue of the Heroes of January Sixth. From peak to midden in thirty years.
Again: This is a masterful work of witnessing and interpreting a Boomer life, so why not five stars? For my own reading tastes, it lacked emotional effect. There are wins and losses, weddings, births, and funerals, and none of that touched me. This has the makings of a lasting classic — it feels important and enduring — and it will earn every five star review it gets (from other, less cranky, reviewers).
