A truly masterful piece of work. I will read anything written by McEwan and Lessons was no disappointment. Vast in its scope and its consideration of themes, this is a wide ranging book that inspects history through the lens of its effects on one man and our own individual impact on the world. Well paced with a wonderful writing style, this is the work of a truly sublime author,

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Book 19 of 2024

I have always been a lover of Ian McEwan’s fiction but have not read many of his most recent works and this was certainly different to what I expected. It was an epic read which took me some time, partly due to the fact it spanned decades and some parts were, typically for McEwan, hard-hitting and uncomfortable. I looked through my notes to find the a quote I jotted down from the NY Times about such feelings: “McEwan can make a reader feel as though she has bent forward to sniff a rose and received instead the odor of old sewage.”

‘Lessons’ is a classic Bildungsroman with many semi-autobiographical elements from McEwan’s own life. We start with the main character Roland Baines as his wife, Alisa, has gone missing, leaving him caring for their seven month old baby, Lawrence. She explains her absence and leaves her keys on the bed after declaring: “I’m OK. It’s not your fault. I love you but this is for good. I’ve been living the wrong life.”

We then move to Roland’s childhood, his life at boarding school, through to his seventies. The scenes with twenty-five-year-old piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell (as Roland was fourteen) were reflective of how they shaped his future relationships with women. This abuse moves from school to her house where she cooks for Roland and even suggests marriage: “Round-faced, erect, perfumed, strict. Her beauty lay concealed behind her manner. She never scowled or smiled. Some boys said she was mad, but he doubted that.” At sixteen, Roland manages to escape what he once thought was “erotic bliss”, realising he had been groomed and that the boys were right - Miriam was mad.

All the while we have major political and historical events serving as the backdrop, from Chernobyl, the Cuban missile crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Iraq, AIDs crisis and COVID-19 (obviously not listed chronologically here).

I will recommend it if you like Ian McEwan but don’t expect to read something familiar in tone and style.

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6/10 Well written but I feel the book could have been better crafted. I felt too uncomfortable with the subject matter and I was yearning for more out of the plot than the concentration on the many characters.

The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over. So too was excusing yourself by reference to your background. Insufficient parents? A lack of love? Too much of it? Enough, no more excuses. You had friends of a dozen years or more. You could see your reflection in their eyes. You could or should have been in and out of love. You would have spent useful time alone. You had a measure of public life and your relation to it. Your responsibilities would be pressing in, helping to define you.

If someone held me up and told me to tell them what happened in this book, I'm not sure I would be able to tell them. I enjoyed the Ian McEwan books that I've read, which is why I requested this read. I was SO excited for this. A long-form book following one character throughout their life? Sign me up. That's the type of book I absolutely eat up...usually.

This book follows Roland after his wife abandons him and their young son, Lawrence. It touches on him getting to grips with the break down of his marriage and finding his feet as a single parent. We stroll down memory lane with Roland as he reflects on happy moments of his life, but also some quite dark ones, including the abuse from his former piano tutor (who at one stage seemingly holds him hostage and tries to coerce a very underage Roland into an illegal marriage). It becomes clear that in the present day, Roland had never fully dealt with this abuse, and the side affects of that leeched into his relationships with his wife, Alissa, and any other partners he has later. We see him travel, watch his son grow, meet new loves and lose them, lose his parents, gain new family, so on and so forth.

I don't know how much I really have to say about this read, it took me ages to read. I found it dragged a lot, too many words, not enough action in a lot of places which I found quite hard to get through. It was fine. Nothing exciting. I have to admit it was a bit of let down as I was so excited to read it.

You buried your parents, or they buried you and grieved more piteously than you ever could for them. There was no greater affliction than losing a child. So count yourself and your father lucky.

I found this to be quite a slow read. Roland irritated me for most of the book, to be honest - I found him very hard to develop any empathy for. I feel quite bad about this because he suffers a lot during his life including parental neglect, bullying, sexual abuse from his piano teacher - all of which impact on his capacity to develop relationships in his adult life.

The book is beautifully written against a plethora of significant historical moments, which really helped to shape some of Roland's experiences. It was cleverly plotted with people from Roland's past reappearing and helping his to reframe some of his memories and explain what might have led to certain experiences in his life.

I hated his first wife with a passion - self-interest and selfish. How could one person be so callous? Lawrence is the one who suffers most as a result of her decisions.

The title of 'Lessons' is appropriate and reflects that Roland is constantly learning from his experiences in life. Roland survives rather than thrives, I felt. He seems paralysed by what might have been an unable to truly live his best life.

Not my favourite McEwan read - though thought provoking and introspective. I wanted more for and from Roland and ultimately was left feeling regret at the choices he did not make.

Judging by the premise, I feel like I should have enjoyed this book a lot more than I did – it's a simple but very layered story of a boy born in 1948 and his life up to 2021. That's very much the kind of book I appreciate, and not sure whether it was Ian McEwan's writing or the character of Roland that meant I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have expected. I think part of that is down to the gaps in his life story – Lessons focuses very much on the domestic and mundane, but Roland did a lot of cool stuff in the 70s that's barely touched on and I wanted to read about that too! Like a lot of big books – it's around 500 pages – I did appreciate it more and more as it progressed, and there was a real sense of a life lived, at times disappointing and at times full of joy. I liked how political it was, too, and how the personal really was political; the sense of human lives being shaped by the madness of big world events. I was also intrigued by how Ian McEwan uses a lot from his own autobiography, but employs them to such a different effect. Ian McEwan is not really a fave, but it is still a good book even if it didn't quite fulfil its promise for me.

Vivid and readable on the whole, this biographical novel covering a near lifetime is one I would strongly recommend. However, about a third of the way through the book seems very self indulgent in that it is about the life of a man who must be roughly contemporary with the author. It then recovers. I feel that it could have benefited from tighter editing. However McEwan's talent for great descriptions and believable dialogue is as strong as ever.

I was sent a copy of Lessons by Ian McEwan to read and review by NetGalley. I was enjoying this novel at the beginning, liking the way it was written. Unfortunately it soon became what seemed to be a series of historical essays with the odd addition of story mixed in. I almost gave up about a third of the way through but I decided to persevere a little longer as it seemed to get back to the protagonist’s own story. Unfortunately it didn’t take long to revert back into essays on the political and global issues of the time. I feel I gave this novel more than enough chances, but in the end I decided I really didn’t like or care about what happened to the protagonist and I am old enough to remember the wars and politics during my lifetime. I enjoy historical content and context in novels, I just didn’t like the way this aspect was written in this book and in the end I couldn’t bring myself to finish it.

Ian McEwan's latest sprawling and ambitious epic has strongly autobiographical elements, such as his childhood spent in Libya, a story that focuses on Roland Baines through the decades of a life intertwined with and shaped by the background of global and national history right up to the present. The challenges of growing up in this period of history, going back and forth in time, trying to make sense of life and the world, the ageing process, and lessons offered are illuminated through Roland, separated from his blended family for good when he is sent to boarding school when he is 11 years of age.

I’m still waiting for a ian mcEwan novel that will hold me as deeply as atonement did. Unfortunately this still wasn’t it. Very slow to start and an odd story

I have really enjoyed many of Mc Ewan's novels ( but not all) and I find that have come away from this novel perplexed . Although it is long, I never felt it was a slog and I could luxuriate in the author's prose. I loved the historical sweep of the novel too. I think my main issue was to do with the character of Roland, and in particular his disturbing relationship with the piano teacher, which was to impact on all of his future relationships. i suppose the fact that I found it troubling means that the novel has done its job.

Loved this, a return to form for Ian mcewan, a brilliant rambling epic with so many layers and so cleverly tracking social change without ever being dry.

“He wondered, as he stood draining into the bowl, whether he should be worried that his stream was so weak. He thought of Joyce, of Stephen and Bloom at the end of their day, pissing side by side at night in the garden. Ithaca. Once Roland had possessed Stephen’s trajectory, ‘higher, more sibilant.’ Now he had Bloom’s, ‘longer, less irritant.’”

When Roland Baines’ wife goes missing, leaving him looking after their 7-month-old baby Lawrence alone, he starts to look back at his life and the events which led him here. Lessons is largely a Bildungsroman, as we walk backward through Roland’s childhood, and forward with him all the way to his 70s.

I must admit that it took me a while to get into this book. I crawled along with no impetus to pick it up until about 10% of the way in, at which point I felt it ‘took off’ for me and I became quite taken with Roland’s life. This was my first reading of an Ian McEwan novel - shameful I know, especially now that I’ve had it confirmed his writing is clearly right up my street!

I was fascinated by the pieces of his own life that McEwan put into this book, such as his childhood spent in East Asia, Germany and North Africa, as the son of an army major.

Roland is the epitome of someone who drifts through life, being nudged in certain directions largely by circumstance and taking little decisive action himself. It’s this sense of coasting that has him melancholic as he ages: should he have done things differently? Does he have regrets?

An exquisitely written epic spanning decades, Lessons refers not only to the piano lessons he had with Miss Cornell as a boy at boarding school and the repercussions they would have on him throughout his life, but also the lessons that life teaches him over the years.

Lessons by Ian McEwan spans the life of Roland Baines, born shortly after the Second World War. Taking in several major world crises from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Chernobyl disaster to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as intimate domestic events, ‘Lessons’ is a sprawling epic and easily McEwan’s longest novel. Some elements of Roland’s early life are strongly autobiographical, including his childhood spent partly in Libya and his discovery late in life that he has a half-brother, as McEwan did in 2002. However, it is the repercussions from the piano lessons Roland received at boarding school that have the most significant impact on his life. I read but didn’t review McEwan’s previous novel ‘Machines Like Me’ in 2019 which I didn’t think was among his best work, but I would say that ‘Lessons’ is very much a return to form and genuinely engrossing. Many thanks to Vintage Books for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Looking at its length, I sighed thinking 'how could I make it through' .. Well, while recognising is rich prose style, and admitting its credible character depictions (and the damages humans can do to each other) it was a slog, and I read it in leaps. The historical events that clearly informed him and allows McEwan to tell a broader more grand story, thereby reaching an international albeit smaller audience etc He's a stunning prose writer .. leisurely, if you like that ... an engaging master victim writer who kind of looks away from his audience at times to luxuriate in writing for writing's sake..

Ian McEwan makes a move away from the close forensic dramas of Nutshell and Machines Like Us to bring us an ambitious 500-page epic of an ordinary man’s life from boyhood to old age.
Roland Baines is a mediocre man who plays piano in a hotel, never rising to his full potential. His story starts as a 14-year-old boy, when he is seduced by his predatory piano teacher Miriam while at boarding school in England.
Their disturbing relationship has a profound effect on him as he stumbles through life. His first wife abandons him and their infant son to become a celebrated novelist and he resigns himself to the mundanity of fatherhood. Later he finds love with a family friend but this relationship is brought to a tragically early end.
Against this backdrop are the cataclysmic events of the time, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chernobyl to Covid. Roland drifts through all these tumultuous world events and personal crises with a strange passivity. Even his later reckoning with Miriam feels muted and anti-climactic, as he declines to allow a prosecution to go ahead.
A brilliant but unsettling read that entertains while asking big questions.

REVIEW PUBLISHED IN YOU MAGAZINE, SOUTH AFRICA'S LARGEST WEEKLY MAGAZINE

I read some reviews which said this was McEwan’s masterpiece. I did enjoy it but there were moments for me when it plodded along the way many of his others do not. Very good but not excellent.

Much though I have appreciated Ian McEwan’s writing in the past, and was hopeful from the blurb for this book, I just could not engage with the characters and consequently didn’t get beyond half way. Disappointing.

I really don't know how I felt about this book, it was beautifully written and a real tour de force, covering so much ground and the depth of almost the full arc of a protagonist's life. However, the opening was an unsettling hill to traverse and it just felt like a slog to read. Unsure.

I am a lover of Ian McEwan as a general rule and was really pleased to get an ARC of this book. This novel is a narration of the life of Roland Baines and the world Politico-social events that surround it. The text reads like Roland's reflections over time and Gosh does he have a lot to reflect on. We are "treated" to the minutiae of his life if treated is the right word. For me any attempt at storyline got lost in the mountain of that minutiae and I as the reader was left searching for the meaning underneath it all.

I failed to be drawn into the characterisation in more than a desultory way in fact I wanted to give most of the characters a good shake. I think the first 50 % could be reduced down to a few paragraphs at most a more reasonably paced couple of chapters. The middle section at least had some interest and pace but that did not last long enough to get me to the end.

I am really disappointed by what i had expected to be a great read, but instead proved to be as "plodding, earnest and lifeless" as an article he describes writing in the latter pages of the book.

I hope the author reverts to form in time for his next book