Ian McEwan didn’t have a seductive piano teacher at the boarding school, he laments. It is in the afterword that the author feels compelled to emphasize that there was no young, passionate piano teacher in his childhood. But in the novel, there she is, the twenty-something Miss Cornell, who begins an intense and overwhelming relationship with her fourteen-year-old student. Passion or sexual assault? It is the student Roland Baines who is portrayed by McEwan. Roland grew up as a military child in Libya. The steamy relationship with Miss Cornell causes him to leave the boarding school without passing the exam. He lives a roving life with odd jobs, short-lived love affairs, and with one decisive task in life: raising his son Lawrence alone, since the boy is seven months old. The mother of the baby – who is not the piano teacher – leaves only a note with a brief apology, before she leaves her husband and children to follow her calling, namely to become one of the greatest writers of her time. Is life changed by women Ian McEwan is himself one of Britain’s most widely read contemporary writers. When he now makes an attempt to describe his own times in one long story from the 1950s until the corona pandemic places restrictions on all social life, these are precisely the central themes: How to live with the shadows from a sexual abuse in childhood, when one also feel complicit? How legitimate is it for an artist to sacrifice the happiness of his loved ones in order to achieve the highest artistic value? What if that artist is also a new mother? Roland’s life is defined by these two women. Only very late in life does he find himself, despite the past that haunts him. Capturing the contemporary “Leksjoner” is, with its 500 pages, McEwan’s longest novel. It is also the first in which he writes his way through decades after decades of political conflicts and international events seen through the eyes of one man. FROM MCEWANS HISTORY CLASS: American spy photo of the Soviet missile base in Cuba. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.FROM MCEWANS HISTORY CLASS: The world held its breath, almost literally, when parts of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were destroyed in an explosion in 1986, spreading radioactive materials over large areas.FROM MCEWANS HISTORY CLASS : The Berlin Wall was a symbol of the division of Europe during the Cold War. The wall fell on the night of November 9-10, 1989, and people climbed up to celebrate. FROM MCEWAN’S HISTORY LESSON: Britain was formally withdrawn from the EU on January 31, 2020. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was given the job of carrying out the “divorce”. The Cuban crisis in 1962 is decisive for the fourteen-year-old Roland, who, like his roommates at boarding school, fears he will die before he has even experienced sleeping with a woman. In 1986, he seals the windows of his London flat with plastic in fear of Chernobyl rain. A few years later, he is in Berlin just days after the wall has fallen. Roland is a Labor man, but resigns well before Brexit. McEwan writes about the UN climate panel and the woke debate, he weaves in discussions about autobiographical novels – and with that discusses his own novel, which he has said is three quarters fiction and one quarter his own memories. The one quarter is still the most important, he says in a conversation with the BBC. Lacks swagger I think McEwan gapes too much this time. Several of the stories could have been a novel in themselves. Many of the side stories become unnecessary. It may seem that the actual story has taken up too much space. Instead of sticking the knife into one bleeding wound and turning it around, as he has done so brutally in previous novels, it seems that he has to do justice to any of the ideological and political currents of the last 70 years. Then, unfortunately, it becomes too fluid. Ian McEwan’s strength as a writer has been precisely that he is sharp, whether he is depicting the moral dilemmas of a brain surgeon, a Supreme Court judge, a physicist or a figure who looks like a human but is actually a robot with artificial intelligence. In addition to a harsh penchant for the morbid, he has a sense of humour. It is missing in this year’s novel. Linguistically, he is on the mark, well looked after by translator Einar Blomgren. Not Nobel Prize level In a month when the Swedish Academy has just awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to the French author Annie Ernaux, it is almost impossible not to compare McEwan’s new novel with her sober, but extremely memory-producing novel “The Years”. NOBEL LEVEL: Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. McEwan does not deliver at the same level. Photo: ULISES RUIZ / AFP They describe the same era, but with very different results. Where her method is sociological, his is psychological. McEwan gives us lessons in piano playing, in loving, in reading. Perhaps he will give us a lesson in coping with life himself, in his older days. He is a consummate storyteller. Nevertheless, it is Annie Ernaux’s collective autobiography that continues to work in me. news reviewer Photo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag Title: “Lessons” Author: Ian McEwan Translator: Einar Blomgren Genre: Novel Publisher: Gyldedal Norsk Forlag Number of pages: 512 Date: 2022
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“Lessons” by Ian McEwan – news Culture and entertainment
