A book encompassing the life journey of Roland reflecting upon the events of his life both personal and historic staring with Chernobyl through to Brexit and Covid .

“Lessons” is a fictional memoir of Roland Baines, a boy of great promise, a man of negligible achievement.
His story spans his lifetime, the second half of the twentieth century, and bears ongoing references to the historic events of that period. Many of those events have an immediate effect on Roland’s life, in some cases derailing it, in others only forcing him to change the direction of travel. His story begins in Libya where his stern Scottish father, Sergeant Baines, is posted, and traverses through the aftermaths of WW2 in divided Germany, the Suez Canal crisis, the Cold War, Chernobyl disaster and the dawn of New Labour, to mention a few.
The two pivotal events for Roland are the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fall of the Berlin War. These two events intervene directly in his personal life and in the choices he makes that will irreversibly distort his future. The theme of history and political changes on the global scale making life-changing incisions into individual lives is convincing, even compelling.
It is a memoir but it doesn’t present a linear sequence of events in Roland’s life in a conventional way. Two events cast a long shadow over his story and they keep re-appearing to haunt him, to provide justification and generate further questions, and to make him revisit and re-examine them. The first event is his juvenile affair with his piano teacher, passionate and obsessive on both sides. It is instrumental in transforming a promising young musician and academic into a wayward drifter, addicted to sex and averse to permanency and commitment. The second event is his abandonment by his wife Alissa who leaves him and their son in order to pursue a literary career unhindered by family and duty. One can’t help wondering if Roland is not only hurt by her departure, but also in some way jealous that it is her and not him who is able to detach herself so completely from the mundanity of the ordinary, pedestrian life he is obliged to live in order to take care of their son Lawrence. But perhaps that is Roland’s ultimate saving grace. Something that roots him in reality.
“Lessons” is an intelligent, deeply introspective and emotionally loaded book. It has made me stop and think at every corner, at every twist and turn of Roland’s private life and its contemporary context.

This really wasn't the book for me. It's quite longwinded so I found it hard to stay interested. Which meant I kept getting lost. I tried my hardest to persevere but in the end I had to admit defeat.

This is Ian McEwan’s longest novel to date though perhaps not the most complex. Our hero is Roland Baines. Like Mc Ewan, he was born in 1948 and like McEwan he is the son of a military man who travelled around in his career. There are other aspects of his life that show that, in part, but definitely only in part, this book has elements of autobiography in it. Roland’s mother Rosalind had been married before, to a man who was something of a vagrant and who was killed in World War II. She had two children, Henry and Susan, but they were mainly brought up by their paternal grandmother. During the war Rosalind met a sergeant, Robert Baines. She was initially scared of him but they ended up marrying. Roland was their only child. He was brought up in Libya where his father was stationed.

Mother and son had to temporarily leave during the Suez crisis as there was a lot of anti-British feeling in North Africa. Eventually he had to return to the UK for his education, being sent to a boarding school at age eleven.

We learn of three traumatic events in his life early in the book, two taking place when he was still a child. The first was when he and his father witnessed a car hitting a motorcycle with the motorcyclist being badly injured.

The second is one of the eponymous lessons and is also shown on the cover. His parents thought music lessons would be good for him and so he was taught the piano by Miss Miriam Cornell. He pretended that he practised but, in fact, he did not. On one occasion, she pinched his thigh, leaving a small bruise. On one another occasion, however, she kissed him, her lips full on his, a soft prolonged kiss. He was sexually aroused She later invited him to lunch.

The third event occurs much later. He has married a German woman, Alissa Eberhardt. They have a son, Lawrence. Both parents work though not at very well-paid jobs. One day he finds a note on the pillow telling him that she has left him: It’s not your fault. I love you but this is for good. I’ve been living the wrong life. She sends him postcards from her travels as she seems to be journeying across Europe. The police, not surprisingly, think he has murdered her. Bringing up a one year old as a single parents will be a challenge for him.

The book is about how our lives are changed by the actions of our parents and by random events that occur in our lives, whether at the personal level or because of larger events such as war.

For Roland there were various events but a key event is his relationship with Miriam Cornell. They have an affair when he is underage and this effects him in various ways but, in particular, it leads him to essentially give up school work, even though he is very bright and could have done well with a bit of application. Eventually he ends up drifting. He avoided salaried employment in order to be available. He had to remain at large – in order not to be. The only happiness and purpose and proper paradise was sexual. A hopeless dream lured him from one relationship to the next.

As well as being bright, he is an excellent pianist, thanks to Miriam Cornell, and could have done well. He does join a jazz band where he makes a lifelong friend but his musical career will primarily involve playing the piano at second-rate hotels for the entertainment of the guests. He is also an accomplished poet but his success is limited to writing poems for greetings cards. He is also an accomplished tennis player and earns his living in part as a coach.

We follow his drifting both before and after Alissa, though, being a single parent, his drifting comes to mean not having a steady job.

We also learn of others in the book who are influenced by their parents and events. The main example is Alissa. Her mother, Jane, had worked in a fairly menial role for Horizon, a well-respected literary magazine founded and run by Cyril Connolly, a well-known writer and critic of the day. Jane persuades him to let her go on a journey to write a story about White Rose, a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany whose leaders had been executed by the Nazis but of whom there were some survivors. She meets several but the last one she meets was a peripheral figure in the group, Heinrich Eberhardt. They will fall in love, marry and have a child, Alissa.

Alissa will grow up feeling that her mother had abandoned a promising literary career to become just a wife and mother and that she, Jane, very much resented it. Mother and daughter argue continually. Alissa is determined not be her mother and but have her own life and be a successful novelist, something she cannot be with a husband who seems to drift around and a young son.

World events have also influenced the main characters and this is explicitly outlined. Roland’s parents were very much influenced by the war as regards their relationships. Roland continually refers to various key events in British and world history which seem to affect him. A prime example is the fall of the Berlin Wall when, entirely by chance, he happens to be in Berlin and, quite improbably, bumps into Alissa.

Three of the characters – all women – do things that, by normal standards, would be considered unacceptable. Two abandon minor children, leaving others to take care of them, while Miriam Cornell seduces an underage boy an even tries to abduct him. All three explain their actions and it is up to the reader whether to accept their explanations.

Some of the men are far from being saints, with wife-beating and infidelity being two of their flaws. The focus is, of course, on Roland and while his relationship with Miriam Cornell is foolhardy, he is technically the victim. He subsequently makes what, objectively, we might consider poor decisions, certainly as far as his career goes, but he is never violent or unfaithful. Indeed, McEwan stresses more than once the fact that he is monogamous in his relationships.

McEwan said, about this book, I’m going to plunder my own life so we must assume that some of Roland’s story is McEwan’s story though there is an interesting bit at the end when Alissa, in a novel she writes,seems to refer to Roland and others make this assumption as well. She, however, points out that, while clearly some of the details make seem similar to what happened to Roland, a great deal of the story is very different from Roland’s, his girlfriend in Alissa’s novel becoming German Chancellor, for example. Similarly while there are episodes from McEwan’s life in Roland’s story – the boarding school, living in Libya, his wife leaving him, for example, much of Roland’s story is very different from McEwan’s. McEwan has pointed out that there was no Miriam Cornell in his life, which is not to say that he did not fantasise about an older woman when he was fourteen.

He even manages a dig at the British writers of his era: They busied themselves with social surfaces, with sardonic depictions of class difference. In their lightweight tales, the greatest tragedy was a rumbled affair, or a divorce. None but a very few seemed much bothered by poverty, nuclear weapons, the Holocaust or the future of humankind or even the shrinking beauty of the countryside under the onslaught of modern farming. I could certainly argue that as regards some British writers but space forbids.

Overall McEwan tells an excellent story of Roland and others whose lives are shaped by both world events and what their parents did and did not do, though those angry or disappointed gods in modern form, Hitler, Nasser, Khrushchev, Kennedy and Gorbachev may have shaped his life but that gave Roland no insight into international affairs. We follow Roland up to the present day – the covid pandemic but before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are hidden family secrets that emerge and various relationships, some of which work, quite a few that do not, though Roland more or less manages with the inevitable ups and downs. He clearly was most affected by Miriam Cornell – that woman rewired your brain a later lover tells him. Ultimately life is messy, everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid.

There is a guiding book to this novel and it is L’Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education ), Flaubert’s tale of Frédéric Moreau living through troubled times and having a romantic life. Whether Roland’s life can be called a sentimental education or, indeed, whether the lessons he received can be called lessons learned is open to discussion.

In Ian McEwan's Lessons we meet Roland, whose wife has inexplicably left him and his infant son Lawrence to travel around Europe and write a book.

Trying to work out why she has left Roland thinks back to events in his past, from his teens at boarding school where he has a relationship with his 20 something year old piano teacher Miriam, to his friendship with a  group of bohemians in divided Berlin in the 70s.

By taking us through the details of Roland's life McEwan considers the impact of small events on the trajectory of a timeline. If he hadn't had the affair with his piano teacher, would he have worked harder at school and gone to uni? Would he have had a more impressive career himself? But then he wouldnt have met his wife and had their son!

Lessons is a detailed and, in places, difficult read. I found it a bit of a slow burner but the detail is important and becomes more pertinent  as the story  progresses. A challenging and thought-provoking read.

I like a good long novel where you really get to know the character, and you see them go through a whole life. This one was a bit too long to my taste though and at times, although it was not hard to follow, I found the number of characters and the jumps back and forth between various times slightly irritating. Maybe this is what happens when you watch so many TV series - you come to expect a linear story and flashbacks become a nuisance.
I found the main character cliche and irritating in the right way, a proper well-meaning boomer with little substance in the end, who thinks he is alright because he votes Labour, but does not do very much. apart from quite a bit of thinking and talking. I would have liked to know more about Alissa, his wife who left and became a celebrated writer, and I think there was maybe a missed opportunity towards the end when the character revisits a teacher (no spoiler), but that fits well with the character I assume.
Overall a pleasant book, too indulgent and long for my taste, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Ian McEwan deserves a lot of credit for writing such an ambitious novel. But he loses a good deal of that credit because, really, it isn't nearly as good as it should have been. The writing is stuffy, the prose is long-winded, and the life it describes - that of abandoned son, confused lover, jilted husband and loving father, Roland Baines - is actually a little bit dull.

I went into this with some excitement. I love epic stories like this, and count William Boyd's 'Any Human Heart' and John Boyne's 'The Heart's Invisible Furies' among my all-time favourite novels. However, while this work was certainly in a similar vein to these, McEwan has failed entirely to reach the dizzying heights set by many other authors of the genre.

To be honest I’m not quite sure where to start with this review. Its an epic story about the life of Roland Baines and the historical events that happened during his lifetime. A very interesting read, and as you would expect very well written, although in parts I found it a bit wordy. I was particularly intrigued with the historical content, spanning event in the period from the Suez Crisis in 1956 to the recent Covid pandemic, a lot of events that I remember well but seeing them here from a different perspective.

Briefly, when his wife, Alissa, leaves him with a young son, Lawrence, to bring up Rowland reflects on his life and how world events as well as more personal events, closer to home, affected it.

A tale about life’s lessons and how events can affect a person’s future. In Rowland case his from his very early life in Libya and his early school days, sent to a boarding school where he had a relationship with his piano teacher that affected his whole life. It’s an emotional read and one I’m glad I read. Hard to describe the book without giving too much away. One you need to read for yourself.

I was very excited to read a new Ian McEwan book as I've enjoyed many of his previous novels.
Whilst this one was big in many senses of the word; length, the timespan it covers and the cast of characters I feel very ambivalent about it as I wasn't particularly interested in the main character, Roland, finding him quite tedious and boring and I fidnt really care what happened to him after the first part with the music teacher and his missing wife. I enjoyed looking back at historical events I've lived through but did find some of the central part of the novel hard going and it was very tempting to skim read..
Thank you to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book

Lessons is the fictional biography of Roland Baines, a man who once might have been a concert pianist, a prize-winning author or a Wimbledon champion. Alas, fate pointed Baines instead to writing (or plagiarising) middle-brow verses for greetings cards, coaching overweight middle aged Londoners to play tennis (by letting them win) and bringing up young Lawrence Baines following the suspicious disappearance of Roland's wife, Alissa.

In drip fed flashbacks, we discover that Roland was brought up in Libya, his father being a gruff Scottish serviceman, and that at the age of 11, Roland was packed off to boarding school where he had some interesting times with his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell.

There are clear autobiographical details. McEwan himself was brought up in Libya and his father was a gruff Scots serviceman, etc. The end note is clear, though that while McEwan's erstwhile English teacher is mentioned by name, there was no such teacher [at his school] as Miriam Cornell.

Roland's life is mapped out against the major events of the last seventy years: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Suez, the fall of the Berlin Wall, New Labour, Covid, etc. Naturally, this being an Ian McEwan novel, they are introduced out of sequence and references are made back and forth in the text. It is a style that appeals to me, creating something that feels more rounded than linear.

The game, at least for this reader, is to decide what is autobiographical and what is fiction. Sure, Roland seems quite mediocre and unfulfilled. Alissa, on the other hand, becomes a world-renowned novelist who is criticised for becoming stale and generally hanging around for too long. Her final long work was a work of autobiography in which she cast Roland, her long estranged husband, as a wife beater. Roland objects, saying he had never lifted a finger to her, and she responds by saying that it is all fiction and is amazed that anyone would believe it. This, of course, will make the reader wonder whether the depiction of Roland Baines's father as a domestic abuser is fact or fiction.

Lessons is a densely packed novel, with a lot of thoughtful commentary on politics and social values. The meandering narrative, reminiscent of a Ronnie Corbett chair sketch, is well controlled and consistently interesting. There are moments of suspense, heartbreak and occasionally joy. The meld of world events and the personal narrative works very well. If there is a minor quibble, it is that the later years do drag a little, perhaps outstaying their welcome. Too much family and not enough events in the final pages. But overall, this is a superb novel that knocks spots off some of the current Booker long list.

You can ‘learn your lessons’ which is good, or you can be ‘taught’ them which is sometimes okay and, sometimes, very painful. In the short term, you may not know which kind of lesson you’re actually stuck in! The lessons for Roland Baines, in Ian McEwan’s latest novel, start with a paedophiliac encounter between an eleven year old boy and a woman piano teacher, and they continue throughout his life and into old age in different situations and with different people. Lessons, like the first one, can have lifetime negative consequences, lead you into complete misunderstandings about what you did or what you should have learned, and take, literally, a lifetime to understand.

Just to make this extra confusing, this isn’t just a novel. It’s also part biography and autobiography, a commentary on the second half of the 20th century and it asks to be read as fiction although we all know it isn’t. At the start of the book, Roland, in his 30s, has just been deserted by his wife and is looking back on his childhood and his early schooling at a private school on the Shotley peninsular near Ipswich. WH Auden would have understood the connections as to what your parents did and didn’t do while the music teacher, quite literally, f***ed Roland up. Just to add to the mix, the deserting wife eventually has her own story to tell about Roland which echoes with the way that Ian McEwan roots about in his own relationships and situations as he writes. I seem to remember that an ex-wife of his complained about being restrained by legal injunctions from talking about their relationship while he could churn events from the marriage through his novels. If that’s the case, the boot is – eventually – on the other foot here!

It all makes for a fascinating read. As an adult, Roland could easily be described as an underachiever but the reasons why someone might say that are complex and shifting. Things people did and said in their early lives come back to bite them in multiple presents but, when you forget the metaphysics, there’s an extraordinary picture of a real life not lived to the full, if anyone could work out what full might mean!

I was born six weeks after Ian McEwan, I went to grammar school while he went private but the feelings of loneliness, the discipline and the bullying resonate, as do the events like the Cuban missile crisis and, later, the collapse of the Iron Curtain which provide the temporal and cultural framework for the novel. It makes the narrative even more compelling!

It also has to be said how well-controlled and how well written the narrative is. There’s a bit of a sense of tying up loose ends in the last few chapters and finding out a bit more about what people really felt back then but, of course, even that is deceptive. Hindsight is a good form of self-justification!

It’s a great read. I couldn’t help but wonder whether, in the earliest drafts, the music teacher with the wandering hands might have been male. Arguably, it would not make much difference to the damage which stemmed from that event but, perhaps, it would have been more realistic. You can make up your own mind about that!

I’m completely on the fence about this one. There were elements which I loved, I love McEwan’s character building throughout and how the plot follows historical events. There were however points when I felt like it dragged on, and was tempted to stop reading. It may just be me completely missing the point , or it may just not be the book I wanted it to be- I’m unsure.

This a great through-the-generations story from the post-war era to the modern day, told by the intrepid by-stander, Roland.

It charts his (non-) progress through school and how the effects of that era drive his relationships during the rest of his life.

It also describes the cost paid in love for pursuing one’s dreams. Is loss of love a price worth paying for greatness?

Roland Baines’ wife has disappeared, leaving him alone with their baby son and under police suspicion. Is what shaped him in his youth to blame? To what extent is chance a factor in our life?

A ramble through the life of the protagonist set against the backdrop of the political history from the mid-twentieth century to the present day.

Beautiful writing, as ever, from McEwan. With succinct detail, the reader is placed firmly in time and place.

With thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK for the ARC.

Lessons is the story of a lifetime, quite literally. We follow Roland Baines from childhood, all the way through to his old age in the present day of the pandemic. But really, Lessons isn’t just about the general aspects of life - love, relationships, children, work, social class, politics. Rather, it uses all these aspects to capture something colossal, & illustrate an entire existence. As someone who enjoys 20th century history, lessons appealed to me so much because of how it uses these grand scale politically events &, in doing so, shows how they penetrate the life of the everyman. How one event miles away from your life can cause turmoil, decisions you could never have predicted. It was so concrete & realistic to read of these events coming to fruition in the life of Roland.
Despite being a novel of Roland’s life, his own life is framed by anything & everything but himself. It’s framed by his various relationships and their degrees of success (or, failure). It’s framed by the success of his runaway wife, the experience of his friends in foreign countries under siege, by grief & love, & so much more. In Lessons, we are watching Roland simply grapple with being Roland, but it is so much more. It’s a sprawling novel at 450 or so pages, yet it’s effortlessly seamless, following a natural course of history which we’re familiar with, in a truly day to day way.
We also have the initial subject of Lessons: Roland’s underage relationship with his Piano teacher as a child. McEwan sensitively & realistically deals with this morally dubious, juvenile experience & is expert in uprearing real and honest feelings of confusion & betrayal - something which Roland takes nearly a lifetime to realise.
Lessons may be one of the purest, rawest portrayal of how upbringing truly defines your place within the world & yourself, & how formative experiences are so fundamental, even outside of your natural bubble.

It goes without saying that this was an easy 5 star read for me.

I had high hopes of this book as I like books by this author/. However I did not warm to the central character which made it very difficult to actually read the book. I really wanted to tell him to grow up and make a proper life for himself. However overlooking this flaw for me there were some interesting parts to the book, it was epic in scope and covered many interesting historical events. There were a variety of different characters and great emotional upheavals.

Another dazzling book from Ian McEwan. On one hand an intimate portrayal of how childhood experiences impact the rest of an individual's life, and on the other a social history of 20th and 21st century Britain and how the politics of a drastically changing time bear down on those who live through it. - Once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down - I will recommend this to everyone!

I enjoyed reading this book although at times it is an uncomfortable read. The way the narrators life story is told in the context of world events gave the book a breadth and depth that some of McEwan’s previous books did not have, or not so obviously, anyway. Although not autobiographical this novel certainly feels like the work of an author surveying his whole life as he ages.

Wow... this was definitely a marathon not a sprint and I do have to admit to putting it down and cheating with other books as I read it... Not that it didn't hold my attention. I am a speed reader usually and really have to force myself to slow down and savour a book such as this one. And this is the only way I have of doing just that.
We follow Roland Baines as he struggles to bring up his young son after his vanishes. His life is illustrated with a whole range of real life experiences both in this present day and also, when we enter the second timeline, when he is a young boy at boarding school taking piano lessons from his teacher Miriam.
There's an awful lot of history to be found within these pages. All of which have been very well either researched or recalled by the author. He has definitely put his personal stamp on a few of these. We also have young Roland's coming of age tale - as well as the older one's similar when he is forced into single-fatherhood. Life lessons indeed...
Honestly though, nothing I say will ever do this book the justice it so very well deserves. The poetic lyricism of the narrative blew me away in places and the emotion just oozes from the page. Both positive and negative. I could give multiple examples but I think you are best off discovering the whole as the author intended.
I do admit to being drawn to certain parts of this book more than others but I think that's due to familiarity and my own life experiences creeping in. For that reason I think this would make for a good book-club book.
I'm now going to wait for the Audible version so I can revisit this wonderful story. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

When his wife suddenly up and leaves him and his infant son, Roland Baines is troubled by his past. Facing single-parenthood and suspicion over his wife’s disappearance, Roland processes childhood trauma and learns to live in an tumultuous and ever-changing world. Roland is an imperfect character, and he is not alone in this narrative. I struggled to understand some of the characters’ choices and I found myself losing concentration with the slow pace. Nonetheless, it is beautifully and carefully written and I found the insertion of key historical events help the reader to understand the social attitude of the times and empathise with the characters. Ian McEwan once again successfully delivers insight into the complexity of humanity and growing up.