Ian
McEwan’s latest novel “Lessons”
Explored
in conversation with Jon Cook.
19/5/23
For the second time this
Spring the Lit. Soc. had to seek out a larger venue to accommodate those
attracted by the prospect of hearing the celebrated and prolific novelist, Ian
McEwan, discussing his latest novel “Lessons” with Jon Cook. They might have mentally echoed Disraeli in
the Commons “We come here for fame” although in this case Fame resided in the
aura enveloping McEwan.
In a relaxed exchange
with his interlocutor, our guest laid out the lines of his novel’s plot with
any risk of “spoilers” likely outweighed by the attraction of his fluent,
elegant prose and intriguing ideas. The book incorporated some autobiographical
elements as it followed the central character, Roland Baines, through a life
whose span neatly mirrored the author’s own with real events intruding at
various junctures in the narrative.
McEwan’s inversion of two topical themes commands the reader’s
attention. At boarding school, the
teenage Roland is groomed by the attractive, dominating female piano teacher
and the pair embark on a two-year long affair.
As a consequence, the boy becomes sexually restless and has difficulty
forming stable relationships with women.
Later in life, he tracks his former lover down and confronts her with
the grooming and abuse but finds he is suffering from some variant of Stockholm
Syndrome and his love for her stops him making a formal accusation.
His personal sexual
odyssey reaches a temporary haven in marriage to a German woman who, in another
example of role inversion, abandons him and their baby to pursue a literary
career in Germany. The pair briefly meet
in Berlin as the Wall comes down and she presents him with a copy of her first
novel which he realises is a work of genius and that she is destined to be
Europe’s leading novelist; an achievement that would have been impossible had
she remained in South London as Roland’s wife.
Recognising that she is ill and that her death is imminent, he ponders
on the realisation that her literary legacy will outlive them both and on the mediocre
level of his own attainments.
As always at literary
events, there was intense interest in the technical elements of the writer’s
creative process. Ian told us that he
did not approach his writing with a play book but allowed the plot to unfold as
he wrote. He took issue with Virginia
Woolf’s assertion that character was dead (contradicted by her own “Mrs.
Dalloway”) and observed that Roland’s character in part changed with time but other
features remained the same throughout “Lessons”. Further tips on creative writing were
elicited as our speaker patiently fielded a battery of questions from an
engaged and enthusiastic audience. Judging
from the queue for book signings at the end, few attendees would have echoed
the Gryphon in “Alice in Wonderland”; “…. they’re called lessons …. because they
lessen from day to day.”
