Review: Lessons

Ian McEwan, Lessons (Knopf 2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60092581-lessons?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ElWUVnYtMf&rank=1

Roland Baines looks back upon his life and the painful yet arousing memory of his childhood piano teacher. The remembered perfect happiness of a twisted first love, which he struggles and fails to recreate. His baby Lawrence is in his lap, his half-German wife Alissa gone, leaving only a note. She becomes a famed author, but, inexplicably, refuses any contact with her son.
There’s not a lot of action or story. It’s mostly Roland remembering his life and reflecting on things.
It launches perhaps too soon into the life histories of their parents and grandparents. Readers have to care enough about the protagonist before we’ll willingly sit through the boring stuff. What we really want to hear about is the piano teacher.
What makes it interesting is seeing it through the child Roland’s eye. He’s a child when his father is stationed in Libya. Then he is shipped off to boarding school at a tender age, not yet understanding the whys and wherefores of ‘unspoken family problems’ and of the world. The nation-wide conspiracy of delusion during wartime is mixed with the child’s natural innocence. Roland traces the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance in Germany through the eyes of his then-journalist mother-in-law Jane.
As a young adult, Roland makes several trips to East Germany, which he believes to be ‘a socialist country’—that is, until his friends start being arrested.
As Roland and his grown siblings unravel the unspoken secrets in their family history, three generations—Jane, her daughter Alissa, then Lawrence seek expiation for the dysfunction in their childhoods. Roland has to seek his, too.
I identify with both sides of this family. Like Alissa and Jane, motherhood killed my dreams—though, of course, a sacrifice worth it for the sake of bringing love into the world. Like Alissa, my children’s father wanted no contact with them, a mystery which died with him.
The writing is, as always for McEwan, gorgeous—not a word wasted. Like the McEwan masterpiece, Atonement, this one grows on you.