He’s a sensitive lad, close to his mother, brought up as practically an only child, his older half-siblings back in England, so the parting is poignant indeed, and the nasty pinch from his terrifying piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, both cruel and baffling. We see Roland as a small boy, then an eleven-year old, brought to England by his parents from Libya where his father is in the army, to start boarding school.
The story of the abuse is powerfully told.
It’s also about the damage caused by an early experience of abuse and how this plays out across Roland’s future life. It’s no secret that some of Roland’s experiences are based on the life of Ian McEwan himself, and indeed the novel itself explores questions of fiction and biography, and the consequences of basing fictional characters on real people. The events in his individual life are mapped against a broader historical picture, starting with Suez, moving on to the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and taking us right up to the pandemic. In Lessons, Ian McEwan’s latest novel, he sets out to describe the whole life of one man, Roland Baines, born around 1949.
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