In his most autobiographical novel, which has just been reissued in his pocket, the British writer tells a sentimental education.
While everything seems in place for happiness, his life takes on water on all sides. Roland and Alissa Baines live in southern London. A wedding, a house, a child. Shortly after the birth of their son, the wife permanently left the home to devote herself to writing a novel. Roland Baines remains alone, at 37, with the infant. What did he not see, not understood, not known? We are in 1986 and the Chernobyl disaster occupies the spirits. The poet and pianist Roland Baines goes up the course of the years to try to elucidate the sinking of his couple. The rocking took place in an English boarding school, where the boy arrived at the age of 12. The teenager then took piano lessons, with a music teacher. Miriam Cornell (25) and Roland Baines (14) began an affair, in 1962. In “Lessons” (2023), the great British writer Ian McEwan delivers a sentimental education.
“Lessons” is the most autobiographical of Ian McEwan’s novels. When reading it, we think of works as masterful as “a story of love and darkness” (2002), of the Israeli Amos Oz. The author of “the interest of the child” (2015) mixes intimacy and politics there. From years of childhood to Libya through the discovery of Berlin, in the late 1970s, until the September 11 attacks. Through Roland Baines’ without brilliant character, the writer analyzes the disillusions of a man from the center left, in an era without compass. His friends blame him for sliding right. In “Lessons”, we are in the anti-messes of an anti-hero. The shock is impressive between Roland Baines living in Allocations paid by the State in the late 1980s, and the destiny of the parents of the German Alissa Baines, born Eberhardt, during the Second World War then the rebuilt peace.
Three portraits of women
In “Lessons”, there are three portraits of women: the abusive piano teacher (Miriam); the selfish wife parted without turning around (Alissa); The last too brief love (Daphne). Roland Baines will face the three women of his life, in final scenes of violent beauty. Man looks at his past decisions to answer a question: what man am I? Questions of cowardice and courage are at the center of his concerns. Roland Baines does not want to find any excuse, and especially not that of too loving parents or not enough loving. The character of “lessons” is neither driven by a desire for revenge or a victim feeling. He knew his chance of being born, in 1948, in calm Hampshire, not in 1928, in Poland.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to assault the American Capitol, what is the failure of a life? A marriage that ends after a year; A classic musician who has become a banal bar pianist. We revolve around an image: a teenager joining a bicycle, in the midst of Cuba’s missile crisis, his music teacher. Is everything still Eros and Thanatos? From writing a lightning clarity, as if we could better see the world through the interlacing of the sentences, the author of “Saturday” (2005) deploys the complexity of existence. He was neither euphoria nor torments. He paints the congruence of the two. Childhood, the discovery of sex, love, home, faith in Europe, the death of parents, old age. In “Lessons”, no lesson. We plunge into an imperfect common humanity. Ian McEwan believes in the mystery and chaos of beings. There is no ordinary life. We read “lessons” and we say to ourselves: literature is a happiness.
“Lessons”, by Ian McEwan, Folio, 640 pages, 11.10 euros.
© Folio
