As Roland Baines waits for the heart specialist to call him in after a morning spent on tests it’s ‘hard not to feel that the judgement about to be delivered was moral, not medical. Was he a good or a bad person? The heart in question picked up pace. This was a school moment. His future was in the balance’.
McEwan’s moment of reckoning for his protagonist Roland in his novel Lessons, comes at the end of the book. The UK is just opening up after lock downs and Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister. The opening pages describe the memory of a piano lesson Roland had at age eleven in a boarding school in Ipswich, and the thoughts he has outside the heart specialist’s office are when he is in his eighties. Flashbacks describe Roland’s early childhood in Libya where his father, Captain Baines was posted with his family, and the narrative stretches even further back into the lives of his parents, his mother’s first marriage, and into what different characters faced through the world wars and in the aftermath of these. McEwan’s canvas is vast as he reveals the life of his protagonist by weaving in and out of these events and of the impact of the Suez Canal and the Cuba missile crisis, Chernobyl, Britain under Thatcher, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin wall, Brexit, the Covid years and Johnson’s regime. So, this is ‘a whole life novel’ of five hundred pages, narrated in a non-linear style.
Roland’s memories of piano lessons in boarding school haunt him through insomniac early mornings as an adult. As a sleep deprived father in his thirties living in Clapham, a London suburb, and solely responsible for an infant since his wife abandoned them recently, Roland tries to give a place to who he was as a boy. He remembers that his piano teacher, the twenty-two-year-old Miriam Cornell was drawn to him, a boy half her age, and wielded her power over him through contact that was sometimes violent and at other times sexual. As in other McEwan narratives, a chance event, near or far, serves as the turning point in the life of a major character. In Roland’s case, it is the Cuban missile crisis in the autumn of 1962. The boys in his boarding school discuss the possibility of a complete annihilation of the world. Roland, waking up to the terrible thought that he may be ‘vapourised’ without ever having experiencing ‘IT’, finds himself in Miriam’s bed. He is fourteen. The ecstasy and sexual awakening that follow, and the subsequent two-year affair with Miriam transform Roland from a shy introvert into a self-confident teenager with a manly secret that he cannot share. But Miriam’s obsession with him and her manipulations also result in a failed school career, the destruction of his exceptional gifts as a pianist, as well as their relationship. As a school dropout, he ends up going from job to job after a carefree youth involving travel and drugs, and he is, at different stages of his adult life, a construction worker, a musician in a band, a published poet, a writer of rehashed words by famous people on greeting cards, a tennis coach, and a pianist rendering sentimental songs for tourists at a hotel. Once the recklessness of youth has left him and regrets set in, Roland begins to take his self-education seriously, which is how meets and marries Alissa Eberhardt, once his German teacher at the evening school he had enrolled in.
The abandonment of Alissa, of mixed British and German heritage, as she leaves London for the continent, foreshadows Brexit. After her departure, Roland leads the life of an ordinary householder with a very modest income, in a house that is falling apart, and raises their son Lawrence. He is surrounded by a motely group of friends; discussions with them give insights into the characters’ political leanings under Thatcher years, and the seduction despite themselves, of the life to be gained under her regime. A chance encounter with history brings Roland to Berlin as The Wall comes down. He used to cross the border through tight security to meet friends, smuggling books and music in the Cold War years into East Germany. But on this historic day, it is a walk over the rubble, surrounded by hordes of overjoyed, excited people. His friends were punished for their political views under the communist regime and sent off to a remote place and he has lost touch with them. He watches out eagerly for them as people, utter disbelief written all over their faces, cross over into what was once West Germany. Following his instinct that he may just bump into Alissa who had left no trace of her whereabouts, Roland elbows his way through the massive crowds until indeed, he does find her in a café. It turns out that the man with her is her publisher, not her lover, and she is on the verge of launching herself as the author of her first book. She takes him aside and tells him that the banality of domesticity, the squalor of their home, and his insatiable sexual appetite drove her crazy. She doesn’t plan to see their son - ever; she plans to spend her life writing. Then she disappears into the crowds.
Having made a clean break with her role as mother and wife, Alissa authors books that Roland considers brilliant and eventually win her the nomination for the Nobel prize for literature. Notable is the presence of strong-willed women in Roland’s life. Miriam, the teacher who invites the eleven-year-old student, Roland to lunch at her home with the intention of seducing him. Alissa’s mother Jane, Roland’s ex mother-in-law, is way ahead of her time in her youth, and her journals which she wrote while researching a resistance movement in Nazi Germany find their way into the world posthumously. Daphne – dear friend and later, Roland’s second wife is an endearing character, ambitious and large hearted, who is also in charge, no matter what life throws at her. It is as if these women own their desires and wishes, and succeed to a large extent in manifesting these in the world. In contrast, Roland appears to be one who mostly reacts rather than acts - a receiver and an observer of life and history as it rolls by. Even his attempts to document his own life are half-hearted, and he finally offers these up into the fire.
Shortly after Alissa’s first disappearance from their London home, Roland was seen as a suspect in a police investigation because of a poem he wrote which the authorities took possession of. Roland has been proven innocent and several years pass. Their son Lawrence is now a young man. A policeman returns to his house and reopens a discussion with him about that poem. He says that he sees, through Roland’s interpretation of it, the possibility of implicating the adult woman who abused him sexually when he was a minor. He reminds Roland of his responsibility to others like him who may also have been victims and asks him to name the perpetrator of this crime. Roland is non-committal. #MeToo has empowered millions to speak out to the world through a few clicks on a device. An internet search reveals that Miram lives not far from Roland, and still gives piano lessons. He signs up for one in another name. Life offers him a chance to redress his failures. To take revenge. What he subsequently does, brings us back to the question of how he will consider himself outside the doctor’s office; it helps the reader pass the judgement about whether he is a good or a bad person.