In this, Ian McEwan’s umpteenth novel, we trace the life of Roland Baines, exact contemporary of Ian McEwan himself. While not of a particularly scientific cast of mind, Baines has over the years read the occasional book by popularizers of quantum physics and cosmology and finds in the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat a useful way of thinking about how his life has played out. Is the cat in the box dead? Or is it not dead? As long as it remains in a state of potentiality, so Schrödinger tells us, then we can safely presume that it is both dead and not dead. The problem only resolves itself into an either/or proposition when we bring the state of potentiality to an end by looking inside the box. By analogy, youth persists in a state of potentiality; you can be a scientist or a firefighter, or, in the case of Roland Baines, a concert pianist or a tennis pro. Both possibilities remain open until you take choices (or suffer accidents) that begin to foreclose one possibility or the other, or, in the case of Roland Baines, both. Whether we will it or not, the process of aging forces us to bring youth’s state of potentiality to an end and reveals to us what lies in our box.
If Roland Baines had read economists instead of quantum physicists, he might have discarded the Schrödinger Cat analogy in favour of a more pragmatic idea: opportunity cost, the notion that we can’t evaluate the true cost of a choice taken unless we incorporate into our evaluation the gains foregone in all the choices not taken. For example, the cost of becoming a concert pianist is more than the cumulative cost of our education, our lessons, our instrument, our anxiety meds, our agent fees, our travel fees, etc.; it also must account for the millions we have lost by giving up our shot at the Wimbledon purse. For most of us mere mortals, Roland Baines included, the calculus is less about money than about the psychic consequences of our decisions. When we are young, our decisions appear to come without any opportunity costs because the balance of our lives appears to us limitless. This lines up with Oliver Burkeman’s observation in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that most of us grossly overestimate the number of weeks we have at our disposal. Only as we age do we discover that our lives have a limit and, as any economist will affirm, as this most personal resource becomes scarce, its value increases accordingly.
Even before Ian McEwan introduces us to the life-determining contingencies and choices that shape his principal character, he makes it clear that Roland Baines arrives on this planet already embedded in and, to some extent, already shaped by a pre-existing web of contingencies and choices. That web extends well beyond his own parents and their chance meeting in Aldershot at the end of World War II to take in the sweep of historical events as well. So we meet Captain Robert Baines, Scottish born, fought at Dunkirk, a heavy drinker, emotionally remote, the kind of man who expects family life to conform to the rules that govern his military life. He marries Rosalind who was previously married to the late Jack Tate with whom she had two children now in the care of others. Among other things, Roland grows up understanding that his mother fears his father and this fear has turned her into a muted nervous character. Later in life, Roland discovers (and we with him) that the situation was more complicated than his younger perceptions allowed and that his mother’s muted nervous nature had less to do with his father’s domineering presence than he once supposed.
In counterpoint to the Baines family, we have Roland’s first wife Alissa Eberhardt. While her choices have an enormous impact upon Roland, they rest within their own pre-existing web of contingencies and choices. And so we have a second historical digression as we meet Alissa’s parents, her English mother, Jane, an aspiring journalist who, at the end of the war pitches a piece on the White Rose, the German resistance. In the manner, perhaps, of Martha Gellhorn, she travels to the bombed out ruins of Munich interviewing people connected to the White Rose martyrs who were beheaded for their efforts. One of the last of those interviews is with a handsome German man, Heinrich, who was loosely associated with the resistance. Perhaps the most significant contingency in their meeting isn’t that they marry and produce Alissa but that Jane loses her resolve and fails to pursue her journalistic aspirations. She shelves her copious interview notes and someone else beats her to the scoop. The contingency is significant for the way an unfulfilled hope transforms a daughter into the vehicle for vicarious living, and that in turn has life wrenching consequences for the daughter’s subsequent relationships. But we’ll get to that.
In 1959, when Roland was just 11 years old and his father was stationed in Libya, his parents travelled from Tripoli to deposit Roland at an English boarding school, making special provision for Roland to take piano lessons. It is here that Ian McEwan’s thought experiment begins. As one can gather from his interview with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC’s Writer’s and Company, much of what we have read to this point can be taken as autofiction; like Roland, McEwan has two older half siblings whose father was shot in the stomach during World War II; like Roland, his father was a hard drinking military lifer stationed in Libya; and so on. But their lives diverge with the appearance of the young piano teacher, Miriam Cornell. Henceforth, the novel is a laboratory where McEwan conducts a simple experiment: how would my life play out if I tinkered with just a couple contingencies? In the long run, would such details make any difference?
In the face of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the young Roland Baines realizes he might die a virgin. He intuits without understanding that his piano teacher entertains an unhealthy obsession for him and might just oblige him. Oblige she does, and they embark upon a two-year sexual relationship.
All the time he had spent with her in his thoughts and, before that, all the intimidating lessons at the piano were a rehearsal for what was about to happen. It was all one lesson. She would make him ready to face death, happy to be vaporised.
Later in life, when he discloses what happened to a woman friend name Daphne, she states the obvious: this was sexual abuse, statutory rape, the sort of thing police would be interested to investigate. But, as with the relationship between his parents, it seems more complicated to Roland. At the time, it felt as if he was complicit since, after all, sex with his piano teacher is precisely what he had hoped would happen. Yet as a fourteen year old boy, he lacked the maturity to anticipate the consequences of a sexual relationship between a child and an adult: the way it would hamper his ability to sustain future relationships, the way it destroyed his performance at school and foreclosed the possibility of higher education, and perhaps most significantly the way it kept him from recognizing he had a real talent that, if properly nurtured, could have seen him become a concert pianist.
From school, Roland drifts. He takes jobs doing casual labour. He wanders. While Margaret Thatcher imposes her program of austerity, he does LSD in the mountains. He sometimes gets gigs as a lounge pianist. At local tennis clubs, he gives lessons to people who don’t know any better. Even this comes with consequences as his knees suffer later in life. (I can’t help but think of Geoff Dyer’s description of his own tennis game and its impact on his knees in The Last Days of Roger Federer.) Sometimes Roland supplements his income by writing puff pieces for in-flight magazines. In the 80’s, he marries Alissa Eberhardt and together, they have a son, Lawrence.
Without warning, a second contingency plays havoc with Roland’s life: Alissa vanishes, leaving him to raise an infant son in a crumbling Clapham house on a precarious income. Initially, the police treat Alissa’s disappearance as suspicious and subject Roland to the expected scrutiny until he establishes to their satisfaction that she simply up and left, retreating to Germany. It seems she decided life with Roland wasn’t taking her anywhere and she wasn’t going to allow his mediocrity to interfere with her grand plans. With her mother’s failure looming in the background, she begins to publish novels to critical claim and when Roland reads them, he must confess that, objectively speaking, they are very good novels. Perhaps insultingly, none of the novels includes a character even remotely resembling Roland. If she had used her novels to air grievances, at least he could feel outrage, but she denies him even that small pleasure and it feels emasculating.
Like a grand pageant, the novel proceeds against the backdrop of historical moments. The Berlin wall falls. The Soviet Union collapses. The Labour Party has its time in the sun with Tony Blair while his counterpart across the Atlantic takes neoliberalism to new heights. The twin towers. An ill-conceived war based on a lie about WMDs. The 2008 market collapse. A growing movement to take Britain out of the EU. A lunatic in the White House. And, as Roland enters his seventies, a pandemic that puts him in lockdown. Alongside the tiny private contingencies and choices, the grand sweep of global events works to shape a life, Roland Baines’s life, Ian McEwan’s life, the reader’s life. It becomes impossible not to position ourselves between the covers of this novel.
Perhaps the greatest gift to the reader is that McEwan offers us a character who, by subtle increments, changes through time. Roland Baines is not a cipher who represents an idée fixe, not an object lesson in an allegorical tale, not a present day Everyman. If anything, he is an antidote to pop culture’s addiction, both in film and fiction, to the fantasy of mastery, the Sherlock Holmes character who, by dint of sheer reason, asserts control over his circumstances, the aggrieved man who exacts revenge by orchestrating events to a perfect comeuppance, the Grand Master in the chess game of life, the superhero with the secret power that allows him to rise, sometimes literally, above all things mundane. Instead, our hero is a deliciously ordinary man whose only secret power is an emerging capacity to forgive.
Later in life, Roland has an opportunity to meet with (I hesitate to use the word ‘confront’) the people whose actions have most affected him (I hesitate to use the word ‘wronged’). An elderly piano teacher acknowledges that her obsessions were unhealthy and must have hurt the young Roland. In turn, Roland sees no point in pursuing the matter as it will only sustain the feelings of hurt and do little to promote healing. Similarly, he meets his ex wife, Alissa, whose nicotine addiction is exacting its toll. In both encounters, we see how the choices these people made brought as much suffering down on their own heads as they did upon Roland. Whatever he seeks in these meetings, whether we call it retribution or justice, was already baked into the exchanges when they played out years before. Now, with the passage of time, he sees these two people as pitiable and feels empathy for them.
On one reading, Lessons is about freedom. Nowadays, people strong-arm the concept of freedom into the service of nationalistic causes: freedom from foreign influence, freedom from big government, freedom from public health protocols. And certainly the pageant of historical events that plays in the background of this novel points to such accounts of freedom. But I think McEwan has something more modest and more personal in mind. His is a freedom from our past missteps and misfortunes and from the impulse to wallow in the assumption that somehow these determine our present moment.
In his sixties, Roland exercises unprecedented freedom by asking his longtime friend, Daphne, to marry him, something he should have done years ago. Almost immediately, a third great contingency visits Roland: Daphne discovers that she is terminally ill. As I’ve already mentioned, this is not a tale about the mastery of one’s own destiny. Even so, Daphne’s death becomes the occasion for one more act of forgiveness. In a chapter of brilliantly comedic writing, Daphne’s ex-husband, a bullying, entitled Brexiteer, defies her last wishes and intrudes upon what was supposed to be solitary ritual that would see Roland cast her ashes into a river. The ex-husband beans him with a rock and he watches prone in the river’s shallows as the bully completes the ritual without him. Roland bears the indignity with grace, reasoning that at least Daphne’s ashes ended up where she had hoped they would end up. He lets the matter go. What would anger accomplish? It wouldn’t unwind the past. Nor would it change the bully into a kinder man. It would only ratchet up his own pain. And beyond a certain point in life, with its attendant aches and creaking joints, who needs more of that?
I have suggested that, on one reading, Lessons may be a novel about freedom. But on another, Lessons may be about nothing at all. As Roland observes while reading The Owl and the Pussy-Cat to his granddaughter: “A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.” And while still talking to his granddaughter, this: “…in a liberated moment he thought that he hadn’t learned a thing in life and he never would.” For utilitarian readers who think a novel should reveal a lesson at the end, Ian McEwan’s Lessons may not be for you. As a broad sprawling tale, this novel’s chief benefit is that it creates the space for a reader to daydream and to think about life, much like sitting in a garden, or reclining on a beach and staring out across a great expanse of water.