It opens in May 1986, when Lawrence is a baby and Roland, 37, is busy sealing up his London home in the wake of the news from Chernobyl, which stirs unwelcome memories of how, at 14, the Cuban missile crisis led him into the bed of his sinister piano teacher, Miriam – a terror right out of McEwan’s early tales and in whose presence the book snaps to life. when his son was not at risk from smallpox or polio, or from snipers hidden in the hills above Sarajevo?” From his postwar military childhood in Libya (not the only detail he shares with his author) through the Thatcher years, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Blair, 9/11, Brexit and, yes, Covid from schoolboy masturbation to arthritic widowhood from the hard yards of childcare to the pang of the empty nest, the everyday milestones of Roland’s life tick by to the inescapable rhythm of the headlines: “How could he complain. Lessons covers eight decades in the life of Roland, a twice-married tearoom pianist at “a second-rank London hotel”. Signs that McEwan was wearing his mantle more lightly – with a counterfactual history of modern Britain told as a love triangle involving a robot ( Machines Like Me) and a Brexit-era satire about an insectoid PM ( The Cockroach), not to mention a novel written from the point of view of a foetus ( Nutshell) – are dispelled by the arrival of his longest novel yet.
The jokes began in March 2020: what would come first, a vaccine or Ian McEwan’s pandemic novel? His reputation for topical fiction, hardly an obvious destination when he first broke out in the 1970s with grisly tales of incest, bestiality and paedophilia, owes everything to Saturday (2005), which mulled the pros and cons of invading Iraq through the eyes of a bouillabaisse-simmering neurosurgeon in London: a strenuous yoking of spheres that spoke of nothing so much as the pressure McEwan felt to catch the moment, especially since the book’s acknowledgments made clear he’d been shadowing a brain doctor long before the events the book portrayed.
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