Lessons: A novel

Lessons is the eighteenth novel by Booker prize-winning British author, Ian McEwan. At the age of eleven, after living for five years with his parents in Libya, Roland Baines is sent to Berners Hall, a boarding school in rural Suffolk, to get the education his parents missed out on. His father had always wanted to play the piano: Roland is signed up for lessons with Miss Miriam Cornell.

When Roland is thirty-seven, his wife abandons him and their baby son, claiming in a note that, while she loves him, motherhood would sink her, and she's been living the "wrong life". Now a published poet, Roland has to seek social service assistance as sole carer for seven-month-old Lawrence.

As he copes with sole parenthood and the threat of a radiation cloud from Chernobyl, he is also under suspicion for murder from DI Douglas Browne, who is sceptical of the note and postcards Alissa has sent.

Plagued by sleeplessness, Roland's mind goes back to his childhood: army accommodation in Tripoli, boarding school, lessons with Miss Cornell, and the highly inappropriate affair into which she grooms a pre-teen boy. While the prospect of an older, attractive, single and erotically-inclined lover might be a dream come true for a randy sixteen-year-old schoolboy, even bedazzled, Roland understands it could be the destruction of his future.

In eventually rejecting her, he also abandons his formal education, spends a rather dissolute decade travelling, then begins to educate himself. By his mid-forties, he is coaching tennis, writing reviews and playing tearoom piano. "How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events."

Some of McEwan's descriptive prose is exquisite: "He knew that her mind was elsewhere and that he bored her with his insignificance – another inky boy in a boarding school. His fingers were pressing down on the tuneless keys. He could see the bad place on the page before he reached it, it was happening before it happened, the mistake was coming towards him, arms outstretched like a mother, ready to scoop him up, always the same mistake coming to collect him without the promise of a kiss. And so it happened. His thumb had its own life. Together, they listened to the bad notes fade into the hissing silence."

But, at times, he seems to go off on tangents from his main plot, and although patience with these apparent digressions does offer the reader a fuller backstory, his lofty prose and cerebral subject matter can be enough to make the ordinary reader feel uneducated, even dumb. His protagonist is not all that likeable, making it hard for the reader to care a whole lot about his fate until, in the final pages, he develops into a more appealing character.

With references to national, European and world events, McEwan certainly establishes the era and setting, but his protagonist's opinions on, and reactions to, politics and current affairs do begin to bore, and readers will be tempted to skim. A too-detailed description of a mediocre life that is much wordier than it needs to be.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and the publisher.