Lessons

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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