Lessons

 Ian McEwan

2022, 9781787333967

I bought Paul as gift - not his cup of tea.

A story of Roland Baines' life up to mid-70s

Alissa, wife, who upped and left to become a bestselling author.

Roland brought up son Lawrence.

Episodes in Roland's life are revealed over the length of the book against the backdrop of mid 20th century historical events - it is a sort of reckoning towards the end of his life - he looks back on various decisions he made and tries to work out if other choices would have been better, and what he had leant over the years.

It seems to have taken until his seventies, when he starts to become weaker that he realises his mistakes but that he did not learn from them, and in some ways would that matter/have made a difference anyway?

One interesting point: He thought that the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 would be a start of opening up, but now in 2022 walls are going up in Jerusalem and New Mexico.

Some reviewers indicate that they think it is his most autobiographical book to date.
"A boomer parable"

I liked this from a reviewer, James Walton, in The Telegraph:
Indeed, the sense that McEwan is throwing in all manner of stuff that interests him simply because it does may even be part of the novel’s charm. It also helps that – at the risk of going out on a limb – he’s very good at writing, so that in a novel of discrete set-pieces even the ones that don’t convince are full of terrific sentences, while the many that do capture whole eras, carefully nuanced emotions and, between them, the utter miracle of being alive at all. (Or as McEwan puts it, “the pure luck of consciousness”.)

Meanwhile, Lessons triumphantly achieves its primary aim of conveying the “commonplace and wondrous” intertwining of global history and everyday life.
i.e. of X world event hadn't happened then Y would not have taken place in Roland's life.

The sections concerning Mirian and Alissa, maybe because he was describing women and their choices, he wasn't all that convincing in their developments or explanations on why they took the actions that they did.

I enjoyed reading the book but wouldn't say it was a must-read. Nicely written with some great bits of writing.
Some reviewers say it's languorous, rambling, characters boring etc., but isn't this really daily life for most of us?