I’m delighted to join the blog tour for ‘Lessons’ by Ian McEwan today.
Thanks to Random Things Tours and Jonathan Cape for my place on the tour and for the copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
From the Publisher:
Epic, mesmerising and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times – a powerful meditation on history and humanity told through the prism of one man’s lifetime.
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines’s life is turned upside down.
2,000 miles from his mother’s protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Twenty-five years later Roland’s wife mysteriously vanishes, leaving him alone with their baby son. He is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence. As the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
From the Suez and Cuban Missile crises, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means – literature, travel, friendship, drugs, sex and politics. A profound love is cut tragically short. Then, in his final years, he finds love again in another form. His journey raises important questions. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past?
Sunday Times
‘The supreme novelist of his generation’
My Review:
It’s not every day that I’m given the opportunity to review such a big book! Big name author, huge topic and literally quite massive – nearly 500 pages.
On the one hand, this is the story of the life of one man, Roland Baines. It, in many ways, encompasses a lot of the rhythms and events that are familiar to a lot of us – childhood events that stick with us, significant relationships, changing family dynamics, discoveries about who we are, ageing. In other ways, it is entirely unique to Roland, encompassing his own personal tragedies and memories.
Roland’s life is played out in the novel against a shifting historical backdrop, as are our own. We perhaps all know where we were when we heard about significant historical events and their subsequent impact on us – Roland is just the same. From piecing together the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis from occasional newspapers at boarding school to his personal connections to the story of the Berlin Wall, Roland is never far from the historical events of his lifetime. Sometimes this gives him a front-seat view – other times, he feels the sense of helplessness and panic that we all sometimes do when faced with things much bigger than us and out of our control.
As expected, all this is beautifully described and seamlessly integrated into the book – the news sometimes is foregrounded as it impacts Roland while other times his own personal events are more important. It all feels so relatable and authentic, even to a reader not the same age as Roland (who is a child of the 1950s, arriving in the UK with his military family in 1959 from North Africa).
Indeed, I really loved that McEwan immerses his reader in some of the 20th century’s defining moments – including a lot that I was too young to understand at the time. The sections set around Roland’s connections to Germany around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall were particularly engrossing as I really got to grips with the human cost of the situation there.
Once I was up and running with this book, I found I couldn’t put it down – especially once the focus shifted to Roland’s relationship with his son. I thought that parenthood was portrayed particularly vividly and with a real sense of the struggles and joys it brings. I did find the early chapters harder work, not because they were at all bad but because I found the ‘relationship’ between Roland and his piano teacher a little difficult to stomach. While I could understand how it would have a lasting impact on Roland’s life, I found it quite hard to see from the novel why a grown woman would cultivate a relationship with a child of 11. I know it happens, but I did find this storyline uncomfortable to read – not that literature should always be comfortable, I guess.
This is a story packed with all the ups and downs of life – in some ways, Roland seems to have bad luck but they are of the everyday tragedy sort that people face, adapt to and move on the best they can. A missing wife? Sudden single parenthood? Past abuse? These are merely part of Roland’s story and just the ones touched on in the earliest part of the book – so no spoilers!
I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoys books grounded in historical facts but that also tackles the deeply human elements head-on. McEwan has produced a book that covers huge tranches of Western history but also manages to be about one man navigating his place in the world in his own personal context. It’s an impressive book and one that will stay with me for some time to come.
About the Author:
Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections.
His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller.
‘Atonement’, ‘Enduring Love’, ‘The Children Act’ and ‘On Chesil Beach’ have all been adapted for the big screen.
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thanks for the blog tour support x