Book Review: Ian McEwan engages with the human condition in Lessons
Ian McEwan, author, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival 2019 on October 12, 2019 in Cheltenham, England. (Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images)
- Lessons
- Ian McEwan
- Vintage, pb €15.99
The novel, , opens with an epigraph from James Joyce’s , ‘First we feel. Then we fall’. A master of ambiguity, Ian McEwan is as likely as Joyce would be, to milk a multitude of meanings from those lines. What sort of feelings? What kind of falls? How do the feelings relate to the falls and the falls to the feelings?
First, a piano lesson: Roland, aged 11, and isolated from his family in a boarding school, is pinched, underneath his school uniform shorts, on his inner thigh. As the painted fingernails of the teacher search higher to the elastic of his underpants, physical violation morphs into sexual assault. Here the boy’s feelings of fear lead to a fall, if not a precipitous one, from innocence into experience.
McEwan’s follows the example set by Roddy Doyle’s devastating , in exploring the long-lasting, post-traumatic stress of child abuse, but it has other concerns as well. In constructing the story, the author locates it in the same period through which he has lived, punctuating the years of Roland’s life with the landmark events that have affected him personally.
He touches on the terror felt by parents as the clouds of radiation blow southwest from Chernobyl. His wife, Alissa, has deserted him and Roland is in sole charge of their son, Lawrence. Failing to purchase potassium iodide to protect the seven-month-old, the young father turns to bottled water, plastic sheets and sticky tape, hoping to seal the unseen peril outside the home. These ineffectual responses to threat reflect the impotence of ordinary people throughout modern history.
Roland is a poet and his life, pre-baby, was focussed on writing. The radioactive emission interrupts him as he tries to transform his experience with the music teacher into literature. Roland wants to explain, in a poem, that the memory of the psychological damage done to him at school has made him different, has changed the course of his life. This concept is also at the core of , as McEwan imagines Roland like a clone of himself, a version who takes decisions and makes choices that he did not.
In 2007 Ian McEwan was discovered by elder unknown brother, Dave Sharp. He was born to Ian’s parents, before they married, given away, and adopted by another couple. Ian McEwan could not fail to be struck by the difference between himself, a child of privilege, and his sibling. McEwan is faced, in a way that most of us are not, by an alternative life that might have been his had he been rejected at birth. He must consider also what it would have been like to have been brought up alongside an older brother rather than being the ‘first born’? How did his mother feel about giving up her baby and how did it change her?
Roland Baines is used to explore a parallel Ian McEwan, another possible iteration, one who lives through the same hopeful and depressing world events as Ian McEwan and David Sharp. The questions that McEwan asks as he creates the character of Roland, both in his intimate moments, and in his public-facing life are, how do you feel and how far is your fall?
McEwan focuses on his protagonist, Roland, but he also considers the role of motherhood. What would a woman feel if motivated either by ambition or social mores to relinquish her child? Is this the ultimate fall from duty or is it a rational choice? engages with the human condition in a serious but always accessible way.
