I have been granted the privilege of reading this novel prior to its publication date. And believe me it was a privilege and one I enjoyed immensely.

I must admit I have never read an Ian McEwan novel. I was a bit shocked opening the ARC and my kindle telling me the reading time was over 9 hrs. I finished this novel in less than one day. One day lying in bed after testing positive for Covid, but it was still one day. And I think this novel is going to stay with me for the rest of my life.

When the novel begins Roland Baines is in a rundown house in Clapham with a baby and a wife who has left them with nothing more than a note on the pillow. As the novel unfolds, Roland’s life unfolds. He led an interesting life. His father was in the army, so his childhood followed him around much of his army postings, until he was sent to boarding school. Yet he is none of those things. He lacks drive and focus and seems to have gone through his life in second gear never reaching the dizzy heights expected of him. He has a good insight into current affairs and news events which form a backdrop to the novel. Even getting to Berlin in the aftermath of the wall coming down, but he seems to be almost walking through it pedestrian style. A spectator in his own life.

Many of us are like Roland in that life almost passes us by and before we know it we are in our 50s/60s and no where near the dizzying heights we aspired to at school. Mediocracy is something we grow into rather than having it thrust upon us from an early age. This for me gave the novel its soul. The image in the final chapter of Roland and his granddaughter sitting discussing fables and lessons is an endearing one. Roland has survived his life being mediocre and come out of it with lots to be thankful for.

His piano teacher not being one of them. His relationship as a teenager with the piano teacher is wrong on every aspect and makes for very uncomfortable reading. SPOILER: When he confronts her in later life, I really wanted to hit her. I am left with lots of questions about her and the affair most notably: “How Did No Body Know?” or more likely maybe they did know and turned the blind eye. Whilst the relationship is explored this question never seems to be asked.

As for his wife? At least she stayed in Germany. Roland may be difficult to love, but there is nothing endearing about Alissa.

This novel for me is a 5-star read. A reminder to all of us that whilst we may not achieve our dreams most of us have a lot to be thankful for.

My thanks to the publishers for an advanced copy of Ian McEwan’s new book for review. It is entitled ‘Lessons’, but what they were has passed me by. This is a long book and I admit to being relieved to have finished it. The prose in it is as beautiful as McEwan’s writing always is.

It occurs to me that it is written in the style of a magnum opus - perhaps the author was thinking it would be his equivalent of the Golden Notebook or A Man without Qualities. It deals with the life of Roland Baines, whose world starts with the Suez crisis and ends with him and his grand daughter hand in hand at the end of a COVID pandemic lockdown. In between he had lived through the Cuban missile crisis, life in East Germany, Chernobyl, Thatcher, the Falklands war, Polish Solidarity, the Liberal Democrats, the Guildford Four, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Radio Caroline, the Blair years and Brexit.

As far as I can make out, none of these has made any difference to his feckless, tiresomely sexually obsessed and under achieving life or his fractionally left of centre metropolitan views and mores. I am not surprised it was all too much for his wife, who left him with a small son - easily the most appealing character in the book. She is supposed to have turned into a very talented German writer, whose first masterpiece sounds to me to have rivalled this book in length and turgidity.

What did make a difference to Roland, it seems, is a highly inappropriate series of encounters with his piano teacher when he was barely a teenager. I wish she had been caught and prosecuted, because this would have saved me the effort of ploughing through this dismal and depressing tale.

I wish I could find something good to say about this book, but in my opinion it is best avoided.

It was exciting to be given the opportunity to read an ARC of this novel ahead of its publication, and my thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for that. I say 'exciting' because McEwan is one of my absolute favourite writers and the thought of reading an epic novel of his - one that charts a man's life, and intermingles with factual information about real wars and political and tragic events - felt like an honour. The novel is, indeed, epic, at least in terms of its span. Protagonist, Roland Baines' life is speckled with the sociological affective: his affair (or arrangement, as a child) with his piano teacher, followed by fatherhood, loss of spouse and the unprepared for events of Chernobyl etc. seem to be used as a philosophical example of lack of free-will. All very McEwanish. As is the sense of middle-classness. I wouldn't have expected any less. In many ways, this novel showcases what McEwan does best: that forensic analysis of the everyday that acts like a reading epiphany and makes the reader realise, yes, that's it, that's exactly what I was thinking. It's like a writer-to-reader telepathy. For instance, the descriptions of the way a child (Roland's son, Laurence, in this case) moves and behaves and Roland's response to it. McEwan's description is, as was expected, uncannily astute - from my point of view, at any rate. But, and this is a big 'but', there were great swathes of narrative that were less effective. Zone-outable, in fact. Unthinkable to even write that about McEwan, I know. I wouldn't say this novel was a disappointment, it's highly, highly ambitious, of course it is, and I don't think there are many other writers who could pull this off, but it will be, as others have said, very interesting to see what the general opinion of this novel will be.

I have been reading Ian McEwan and enamoured with his work since discovering him in my early teenage reading days, with the publication of Enduring Love in 1997. I read and saw the creative genius flower over Amsterdam, Atonement and I delved into his back catalogue. McEwan always surprises, from his early career as "Ian Macarbe" (as he was dubbed) to his Booker nominations and multiple awards. His work has felt inventive, creative and has been genre-hopping. For this, his sixteenth full novel, he appears to have gone autobiographical.

Roland Baines' life, which is the story of this novel, shares a number of biographical details with his author, and a number which do not. There are two principal plot lines running here: that of Baines' abuse at the hands of a piano teacher, Miriam, at his boarding school - with whom he is more interested in the sex than the emotional commitment and marriage that she suggests as he nears his sixteenth birthday. The second is that of his relationship - or lack of it - with the mother of his son, Alissa, who abandons them when their son is in infancy and does not re-appear until much later in their lives, when she is a successful novelist living in Germany. These incidents are shown against the backdrop and tide of world history, from the Cuban Missile Crisis, to New Labour, Brexit and Covid.

For me the strongest elements of this novel were in the second half, as Roland faces up to the abuse both of these women have had on his life. There were set pieces here that were as tense as any thriller to me, the emotional core thundering with intensity. These compensated for what was a slightly drier first third.

Roland throughout this novel remains a difficult character to love, his life somewhat frustrated through inaction. He is not the sort of person about whom novels are written today, and for that we should be grateful that McEwan has. Lessons might not be McEwan at his best, but even in his weaker efforts he remains an engaging and provoking read. I enjoyed this one, even when I wasn't entirely loving it, but by its end he had convinced me that it was worthy of being declared another great novel by one of our foremost, living writers.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.

A book that romps through time as we follow Roland and the relationships he has. I loved the interplay of world events and how what was happening on the world stage, such as Chernobyl and the fall of the Berlin Wall impact the lives of those that are close and far away. Roland isn’t always a likeable character and we get comments through him which seem to refer to McEwan’s own life events. We also dig into the life of Alissa and how this weaves into what we know of Roland. The switching about in time, flashing forward and back is very cleverly done although Roland’s behaviour doesn’t endear him and so the parts of the plot where he is central lack empathy,

This is Ian McEwen’s 16th novel, his first – if you exclude the satrirical Brexit novella “The Cockroach” - since his AI/Turing novel “Machines Like Me” in 2019. Six of his previous novels have been Booker nominated (between 1981 and 2007 – one win, four shortlistings) and he was nominated for the first two years of the International Booker (when it was an award for lifetime achievement).

The book (or at least my ARC) opens with a letter from the publisher to the reader talking about how Ian McEwan has “written some of the most lasting, resonant and original fiction of our time”, and that this is a story which is “at once universal and deeply personal ……… set against the past seventy years of political and cultural upheaval” ending “the word masterpiece probably gets thrown around too often, but I use it deliberately and emphatically here”.

The book is narrated in a fairly traditional first person voice by Roland Baines who started Boarding school in England in 1959 when he was 11. Baines father is a working class Scotsman who worked his way up through the war and afterwards to a Major; his mother, Aldershot based originally, had a previous marriage to a soldier who was killed in World War II. Roland’s step brother and step sister from that marriage were placed by his parents with a paternal grandparent and London institution respectively – and when Roland was young his parents moved to Tripoli with the army.

Now for anyone with a knowledge of McEwan’s own biography, or who has just glanced at Wikipedia, there are large amounts of autobiographical detail here – which means for anyone with a little more familiarity one major plot development is inevitable around 300 pages before it becomes clear to Baines.

The book effectively starts in May 1986 (just as the Cherynobyl disaster was beginning to be discovered – one of a swathe of world events which cut across the book), but starts with a memory (“The past was often a conduit from memory to restless fantasising”) of 1959/60 as Roland, a intuitively brilliant but nervous piano player, is effectively assaulted by his female school piano teacher Miriam Connell. Back in 1986, Roland is alone with his very young child Lawrence, his wife Alissa having left after writing a note saying she could not stay in their marriage (albeit the police initially are sceptical of Roland’s role in the disappearance).

From there we look back over some nearly 500 pages to Roland’s school days and early marriage, and forwards over the next 35 years or so right up to the present day.

On his schooldays we particularly focus on his re-encounter with Miriam Connell at the age of 14, where he is haunted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and a commonly shared worry among his schoolfriends that they might die without “doing it” and Miriam effectively seduces and then grooms him for a couple of years before the two break up when she proposes elopement on his 16th birthday (Roland is far more interested in the physical side of the relationship).

This relationship (and the desire for sexual fulfillment it gave him); and slightly more oddly (and I can only assume more autobiographically) a week in Libya where he lived with a sense of unreal freedom in a camp (where forces families were taken to in the feared aftermath of the Suez Crisis) – affect Roland for life with firstly a sense of physical entitlement and secondly with a sense that freedom is possible if only he avoids commitments – both of which are of course anathema to a stable long-term relationship. Added to this a unfulfilled desire to be the very best at whatever he does (piano playing, poetry, tennis playing are all deemed failures) leads Roland to a life of drifting – over time he makes his living from , respectively, playing the piano in the lounge bar of a hotel, teaching amateur tennis players, and writing literary doggerel for a start up high-quality greeting card company.

And we see this and how it impacts Roland’s life and his relationship with his friends and family, all of which plays out against major events. The fall of the Berlin Wall, various General elections – Roland shares McEwen’s centrist Labour tendencies, terrorist attacks etc are more than just backdrops to the book, but more like the stage on which Roland lives out his own life.

Another important aspect of the novel are Alissa (who he originally meets teaching German classes)’s parents. Her father was a member of the (real life) White Rose movement of anti-Nazi but non-violent intellectuals in Germany. Her mother an English lady who forced her way to be foreign correspondent for the (real life) UK literary magazine Horizon – with an original idea to write about the White Rose movement post-War and then to travel but who met her now husband and abandoned her plans, then becoming a mother and frustrated (by domesticity) and unpublished memoir/journal writer. I must admit I found this part of the book (the pre WWI Blaue Reiter art movement features quite a lot also) uninteresting.

The relationship between parent and child – what at one stage Roland calls “parenting, its double helix of love and labour” is a key and important part of the novel – and one we see from many sides including Roland his son Lawrence, Roland’s own differently difficult relationship with his parents, and Alissa’s with hers (particularly her flammable relationship with her mother and overwhelming desire to avoid repeating what she sees at her mother’s mistaken frustrated surrender to domesticity) and the autobiographical twist to Roland’s (Mc Ewen’s) extended family of siblings.

At one stage, effectively when Alissa enters the public stage (and re-enters the book’s stage) as a rapidly successful and hugely acclaimed novelist, this novel takes a turn which is not so much autobiographical as self-referential, in a way in which I was not sure what was entirely motivating McEwan.

For example:

At one stage a collage of dinner party conversational fragments includes a debate of the ability of male authors longlist for the 2002 Booker longlist (and an incorrect tip from Martyn Goff) – only 4 years after McEwan’s own win of the prize (and 1 year after the shortlisting).

At another point, Roland places a bet on the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009, thinking its time for a German speaking author to win, only to pick the wrong German author – and we cannot help but think how McEwan (recognised for prizes and literary awards around the world) reacted to his fellow UEA-alumin and English language novelist Ishiguro winning the Nobel Prize in 2017.

Later Roland admits he was dismissive of contemporary Oxbridge-alumni authors who “busied themselves with social surfaces, with sardonic descriptions of class differences … lightweight tales [where the] greatest tragedy was a rumbled affair or divorce” and topical issues were ignored, only to decude years later that “a tweed jacket never stopped anyway from writing well” (McEwan managing to be an author not from Oxbridge and how does look at topical themes – perhaps too much so – but who is still often pictured in a tweed jacket – so is this trying to have the best of both worlds?).

There is also an odd dig at the literary editors commissioning “novelists rather than critics to review each other’s works” – something I would agree with as the reviews are often superficial and far too positive (hoping the favour may be returned) but which Roland (or I suspect McEwan speaking through him) condemns due to “insecure writers condemning the fiction of their colleagues to make elbow room for themselves”) – which made we tempted to Google the reviewers and reviews of McEwan’s latest novels.

And then towards the end of Alissa’s career (and life) we are told “‘She’s our greatest novelist. Teenage school kids are made to read her. But she’s white, hetero, old and she’s said things that alienate younger readers. Also, when a writer has been around long enough people begin to get tired. Even if she does something different every time. They say, She’s doing something different – again!’ – this from a white, hetero, old author who writes a set of novels which are ostensibly hugely varied (climate change satire, spy romance, court drama and anti-religious polemic, Shakspeare rewrite, AI alternative history and now epic to pick the books since he was last Booker nominated) but which I think most readers would say has a distinctive style.

And perhaps most daringly/ambiguously (I am not really sure at all) we have Alissa’s own novels. When Roland first reads the self-translation of her first work “The Journey’s” he immediately loves it against his better resentment-fuelled judgement: “The prose was beautiful, crisp, artful, the tone from the first lines had authority and intelligence. The eye was exact, unforgiving, compassionate. In some of the starkest scenes there was a near- comic sense of both human inadequacy and courage. There were paragraphs that rose from Catherine’s limited perspective to provide a broad historical awareness – destiny, catastrophe, hope, uncertainty.”

And later he quotes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s ecstatic review hailing it as “Tolstoyan in sweep, with a Nabokovian delight in the formation of pitch-perfect sentences” - and (remember the editor’s letter with which this book and this review open) “a masterpiece”. Further we are told “Alissa Eberhardt is not afraid of our recent past, or of history itself or of a gripping narrative, of full and deep characterisation, of love and the sorry end of love” but that “Only her title escapes her capacity for brilliant invention “

Are we meant to treat these as passages from which to extract quotes to use in our own review of this book (one with a similar historical sweep, a similar treatment of love and the end of love, and even a similarly uninspired title”?

At times (particularly in the rather interminable German sections) I was more inclined to say my thoughts resembled those of Roland on reading of the Chernobyl crisis in detail: “The entire story, the accumulated details, were beginning to nauseate him. Like eating too much cake. Radiation sickness.”

But I think McEwan (even in this quote) is deliberately playing with us – and later as he discusses a fable like children’s story with his beloved granddaughter Stefanie, we have a link back to this book’s title

‘Do you think the story is trying to tell us something about people?’ She looked at him blankly. ‘Don’t be silly, Opa. It’s about cats and dogs.’ He saw her point. A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.

So overall I found not a masterpiece but definitely a good tale.

Rounding up to three stars

There were parts of this book I thought were excellent, they mainly involved Miriam and Alissa.
There were parts I found slow and not so entertaining.
They mainly involved Roland.
That was a big problem in a book about Roland.
I enjoyed the way big news events tied in with his life.
Unfortunately, this wasn't one of my favourite McEwan books.

I love Ian McEwan and he would definitely appear on a list of my top 10 favourite authors. I was so excited to read his new novel and it did not disappoint. People I speak to either love or hate McEwan and I can see why. I know that his writing style and plots may not be for everyone but I know they are definitely for me.

I also love novels which follow one person through the course of a life so when I read this synopsis I knew I would love this.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK, Vintage, Jonathan Cape for an ARC in exchange for an honest review