Life and counterlife: Roland’s mid-30s marital disaster is a funhouse distortion of the gradual collapse of McEwan’s first marriage and the bruising, much publicized custody battle that followed.
The alter ego suffers a trauma that knocks him off course thereafter, everything he does and everything done to him begs to be measured against the real-life experience of the author. On the brink of adolescence, Ian’s and Roland’s paths diverge. Lessons thrives on the interplay between seismic global events-the Cold War, Chernobyl, Brexit, COVID-19-and private lives, in particular that of Roland Baines, an alter ego whose parents, siblings, childhood, and early education are all minutely modeled on McEwan’s own. One of the many questions the novel poses: “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?” The stillness here, the long walks, writing every day, seven days a week, 10 hours a day.” The result is his longest book and among his most engrossing, an exploration of a lifetime and an era, the 70-year stretch from the postwar decade to the present day, the bruised and battered Pax Americana.
Lockdown, perversely liberating, was midwife to his 17th novel, Lessons: “It was one of the most pleasant writing experiences I’ve ever had. View MoreĪware of his good fortune, of his plush surroundings, he acknowledges “an enormous amount of local happiness” cushioning his geopolitical gloom.
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