A new novel from a much-loved author is often greeted with a frothy mix of anticipation and anxiety – the latter for fear of being disappointed. The only disappointment with this epic novel is that it must end. The reader will be transported and transfixed by the mastery of the prose, following the life of the protagonist, Roland Baines.
Lessons begins with Roland – newly installed at a boarding school – receiving a piano lesson. Both sexual allure and brutality emanate from the teacher, Miriam Cornell. He begins an ‘affair’ with his piano teacher at age 14.
Later – and not long married – Roland’s wife, Alissa, leaves him and his seven-month-old son, Lawrence. She wants to pursue a career as a novelist and believes family life will suffocate that ambition, as it did her mother’s.
Roland – British but defiantly Europhilic – never quite realises his potential. His dreams are to be a poet, a Wimbledon champion and/or a concert pianist. He writes doggerel for a greeting card company, is a part-time tennis coach and plays piano in a lounge bar. How much is due to his past? Did what he viewed as an affair subconsciously harm him? Are climbing the heights of a creative career and successfully raising a family mutually exclusive?
Roland’s life is long and is filled with the inevitable joys, disappointments, loves and deaths. This is not just life in a book, but also looking at life as a book. The novel is long, the prose is dense and the moral dilemmas are intricately woven into the narrative fabric. Readers will need to set aside time to digest this book. That investment will be richly rewarded. This is a masterpiece.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ian McEwan’s works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany’s Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998.
His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). Atonement was also made into an Oscar-winning film.
In 2006, Ian McEwan won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader’s Digest Author of the Year.
Solar won The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2010 and Sweet Tooth won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year award in 2012. Ian McEwan was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2014 he was awarded the Bodleian Medal.
Ian McEwan
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