Lessons

A Novel

by Ian McEwan

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NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From the Booker Prize-winning author of Atonement and Saturday comes the epic and intimate story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Vogue • The New Yorker
“Masterful.... McEwan is a storyteller at the peak of his powers…. One of the joys of the novel is the way it weaves history into Roland’s biography…. The pleasure in reading this novel is letting it wash over you.” —Associated Press
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Two thousand miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl 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.
Haunted by lost opportunities, Roland seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics, and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without causing damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?
Epic, mesmerizing, and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime.

Creators
- Ian McEwan
  
  Author
Publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Release date

September 13, 2022
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  - ISBN: 9780593535219
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  - ISBN: 9780593535219
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Languages
- English
Reviews
- Library Journal
  
  April 1, 2022
  In a narrative that moves from the Suez Crisis to the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic, Roland Baines has lessons to learn, starting with adjusting to an unconventional boarding school as an 11-year-old life and experiencing the complexities of his piano teacher's attentions. Decades later, as Chernobyl scars the landscape, Roland is left with his little son when his wife vanishes, and he starts looking to better understand his life as he seeks comfort in art, friendship, sex, and hard-to-grasp love. From the multi-award-winning author of Atonement.
  
  Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- Publisher's Weekly
  
  Starred review from July 25, 2022
  McEwan returns with his best work since the Booker- and NBCC-winning Atonement, a sprawling narrative that stretches from the commencement of the Cold War to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Protagonist Roland Baines, “another inky boy in a boarding school,” is 11 when his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, begins to groom him for abuse. A sexual relationship ensues, and Roland never recovers from the experience. He grows into a distant underachiever, eventually finding work as a lounge pianist in London and, occasionally, as a journalist. He marries Alissa and has a son, Lawrence, but Alissa disappears when Lawrence is an infant. With help from the police, he tracks her movement to Paris, prompting bittersweet memories of their courtship. In 1986, three-year-old Lawrence obsesses over such events as the Chernobyl disaster while Roland confronts the lingering impact of Miriam’s abuse and Alissa’s sudden reappearance. Alissa then publishes a bestselling (and specious) memoir, which isn’t so nice on Roland. Throughout, McEwan poignantly shows how the characters contend with major historical moments while dealing with the ravages of daily life, which is what makes this so affecting. He also employs lyrical but pared-down prose to great effect, such as the scene of Roland’s father’s funeral: “A thin teenage girl in a tight black trouser suit opened the door of the undertakers and made a formal nod as he entered.” Once more, the masterly McEwan delights.
- Library Journal
  
  December 9, 2022
  In a narrative that smoothly embraces the entire 20th century, diffident Roland Baines has lessons to learn, starting with his experiencing the complexities of his piano teacher's amorous attentions as a young teenager. Roland only sort of succeeds as a pianist, eventually supporting himself by playing in a hotel bar; as a young man, he's a struggling poet engaged with the Labour Party and then disengaging as friends he made in East Berlin suffer government oppression. Roland meets wife Alissa when she's the instructor of his German class, and just as her English mother married her German father after World War II because she thought he was a leader in the German resistance, Alissa marries Roland because she initially sees him as a "brilliant bohemian." He's actually a restless, incomplete soul, working serial job and crushed when she vanishes early on, leaving him with a squalling baby and police suspicions that he's done away with her (she's left strict instructions not to be sought out). Throughout, as McEwan unfolds Roland's life and the history of both Roland's and Alissa's parents, we see how we all struggle to put our lives together and avert the damage that's been done. VERDICT Booker Prize winner McEwan (Atonement) offers a profoundly empathetic work rendered in language polished to sterling.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
  
  Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- Booklist
  
  Starred review from August 1, 2022
  After experimenting with forms and genres in his last three books (Nutshell, 2016; Machines Like Me, 2019; The Cockroach, 2019), McEwan returns to his forte, the sweeping family drama. This novel focuses on Roland Baines, who was born in Libya and then sent to boarding school in rural England at age 11. This traumatic separation from his family is compounded by his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, becoming infatuated with him. The effects of these personal experiences and relentless, dramatic global events lead to Roland's peripatetic existence: he is, like the places he is drawn to--Berlin before the wall fell and Northern Ireland during the Troubles--struggling to reconcile the many parts of himself. After meeting Alissa, he believes he has settled down, but the opening scenes focus on the aftermath of Alissa's sudden abandonment of Roland and their son, Lawrence. McEwan is reflecting on his life; like Julian Barnes' The Only Story (2018) and Jonathan Franzen's ambitious tomes, this is a tale focused on a few characters that reveals much about the way the world has changed in McEwan's lifetime. It is a rapturously enjoyable journey and one that demonstrates why McEwan is still one of the most engaging writers around.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: McEwan's many fans will be thrilled to learn of his return to the saga, one stretching from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- Kirkus
  
  Starred review from July 15, 2022
  A tale of aspiration, disappointment, and familial dysfunction spread across a vast historic panorama. Embracing the years from the Blitz to Brexit, McEwan's latest finds Roland Baines, an unaccomplished fellow who scrapes out a living as a lounge pianist and sometime journalist, worrying about his infant son, Lawrence: "Shocked, numbed, scar tissue forming within hours in the lower regions of the unconscious, if such a place or process existed?" The boy has good reason to be damaged, for his mother, Alissa, has abandoned them. She will go on to great things, writing bestselling novels and, decades on, a memoir that will falsely accuse Roland of very bad behavior. Alissa is working out a trauma born of other sources, while Roland floats along, remembering traumas of his own, including piano lessons with plenty of illicit extras at his boarding school. McEwan weaves in the traumas of world history as well: As the story opens, the failed nuclear generator at Chernobyl is emitting radioactive toxins that threaten the world. Other formative moments include the Suez Canal crisis, Covid, and 9/11, which causes Roland more than his usual angst: "Only a minuscule faction, credulous and cruel, believed that the New York hijackers reclined in paradise and should be followed. But here, in a population of 60 million, there must be some." McEwan is fond of having his characters guess wrongly about what's to come: A detective scoffs at forensics based on genetics ("Fashionable rubbish"), while Roland nurses a "theory that the Chernobyl disaster would mark the beginning of the end for nuclear weapons." Well along his path, though, Roland comes to realize a point learned in childhood but forgotten: "Nothing is ever as you imagine it." True, but McEwan's imagination delivers plenty of family secrets and reflects on "so many lessons unlearned" in a world that's clearly wobbling off its axis. A richly observed story that spans decades to recount lives of sometimes-noisy desperation.
  COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- Good Reading Magazine
  
  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. Visit Ian McEwan's website [caption id="attachment_877024" align="alignleft" width="1024"] Ian McEwan[/caption]
- BookPage
  
  Some people never learn, or so history would suggest. One doesn't have to look hard to find repeated patterns that can cause lingering trauma, from interpersonal cruelties to larger events such as wars and other human-made disasters. This is just the sort of material that Ian McEwan—that eloquent virtuoso at mining life's barbarities—likes to exploit for narrative effect, and he does so yet again in Lessons, a scathing novel about the ways brutality, intentional or otherwise, can shape a life. The life at the center of this exceptional work is that of Roland Baines. At the start of the novel, it's the late 1950s, when Roland is n 11. His parents, a tough-love father who was an infantryman in Scotland and a mother who betrayed her first husband, have sent him 2,000 miles away from their home in North Africa to attend boarding school in England. Among Roland's formative experiences are the overtures, musical as well as physical, of a piano teacher in her 20s. "This was insomniac memory, not a dream," Roland says of his adult recollections of those days, among them the time she pinched his bare thigh after he made a mistake while performing a piece from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, leaving a "secret oval mark." Young Roland's relationship with his teacher progresses in unsettling ways, but an equally disfiguring scar appears later. His wife, Alissa, whom he met in 1977 after enrolling in her German language class, abandons him and their 7-month-old son because, as she puts it (with shades of Doris Lessing), motherhood "would've sunk me" and kept her from becoming "the greatest novelist of her generation." McEwan's novel moves back and forth in time to record the salient events of Roland's life: adapting to single parenthood, eking out a living as a lounge pianist, learning of his and Alissa's families' pasts and more. As McEwan recounts seven decades of Roland's life, the author places his character's personal events in a global context and focuses on such international milestones as the Cuban missile crisis, the disaster at Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons is designed to unsettle, which is nothing new for McEwan. Although some readers may disagree, the novel posits that knaves and heroes come in all guises, and that everyone is capable of lies, predation and selfishness. The book has moments of warmth that are surprising in a work from McEwan, but there's plenty of his classic cruelty, too, perpetrated by men and women alike. Lessons may not be optimistic, but as Roland notes, "Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals." Which is another way of saying that, with enough hindsight and sentience, there's a chance that mistakes can be corrected and lessons learned.