Lessons

Ian McEwan

Vintage, £20

Review by Neil Mackay

 

OF all literary fiction’s myriad genres, and there were about 100 last time I counted, the “life story” novel is perhaps the most elegant and fulfilling. We’re not talking David Copperfield here, the “coming-of-age” novel – or bildungsroman, as Germans say – but the fictional account of an entirely fictional life, intended to capture the spirit of an era through the journey of one human, traversing time from birth to death.

William Boyd made a good stab at it with Any Human Heart. Günter Grass paved the way to his Nobel Prize with the fictional life story of the outsider Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum, exploring Germany’s history in the first half of the 20th century. The tragically overlooked John Williams perfected the genre in his 1965 novel Stoner, recounting with exceptional pain and beauty the life of the unexceptional American everyman John Stoner. It’s one of the great works of 20th century literature; a book to leave you breathless and broken as it ends.

Now add Ian McEwan’s magnum opus, Lessons, to the list: the life story of Roland Baines, a man born during the war who moves towards death in post-pandemic Britain. This isn’t The Tin Drum or Stoner. McEwan isn’t an artist of Grass or Williams’s stature. But as a novel which tells the story of post-war Britain, Lessons is without parallel.

At the heart of this book lies a story of cosseted abuse. Baines is the baby-boomer generation made flesh. As a Generation X child of baby-boomer parents, Baines made me wince with recognition, in a way that was at times too close for comfort. The “boomers”, as their disparaging millennial grandchildren have dubbed them, both had it all and suffered deeply.

They grew up in a time of casual cruelty, yet sucked the marrow from the welfare state – free university education, free from war, free everything. Then they pulled up the ladder behind them, waving to their children and grandchildren atop mountains of equity and gold-plated pensions. Clearly, that’s not true for every boomer – plenty struggled and now survive scrimping in old age, but as a stereotype, that cosseted sense holds pretty true.

The boomers did, after all, do a Brexit on the rest of us – safe in the knowledge that they were much more protected than the younger generations from the consequences of their actions. As Baines notes: “His lot lolled on history’s aproned lap, nestling, in a little fold of time, eating all the cream.” A perfect summation of the modus operandi of McEwan’s generation. They got the Beatles, the pill, liberation – and then blew it all as they grew old. A self-centred generation to its very core.

However, at the heart of Baines’s life lies a story of intense darkness: of his sexual abuse while at public school at the hands of a female teacher. There’s something utterly foul about these passages, summoning up the worst of what we know of the era: the Jimmy Saviles of this world casually exploiting children in plain sight, often with full knowledge of other adults who quite simply didn’t give a damn.

If, like me, your parents are now in their 70s and 80s, then you’ll have heard stories of the violence they experienced as children: the beatings, the humiliations. If baby-boomers are a self-centred generation, then they’re also an abused generation. Perhaps those two sides of the generational character explain each other.

Who wouldn’t want it all and to hell with everyone else if you’d been treated like trash as a child by adults who should have protected you?

It’s to McEwan’s credit that he’s daring enough, in this age, to make the two main villains of his novel women. Firstly, Roland’s abuser, Miriam. A monstrous creation: a predatory sexual sadist – in the emotional not physical sense – and a curdled mix of genteel femininity and utter moral corruption. Then, Roland’s wife, Alissa, who leaves him and her baby son to pursue her career as a great novelist. There’s a little frisson here for the reader as they perhaps glimpse, through McEwan’s imagination, the narcissism that must exist in all writers to enable them to create great art. That it’s two women who leave sulphurous footsteps behind them in these pages speaks of the era the book seeks to anatomise: did the post-war social revolution not free women to be just as awful as men?

McEwan is at his strongest when telling of the interior emotional journey of the baby-boomer generation through the life of his rather bumbling, though loveable, lead. Where McEwan falls down is in his attempt to paint his story against a huge historical canvas – as if Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago were living in north London.

The history is too present – too front and centre. There’s nothing subtle about the way McEwan shoehorns in historic events. History sits atop the story, rather than being folded in as an ingredient.

My patience began to wear thin when Roland “just happened” to find himself in Berlin on the night the wall was coming down, as if he’s some kind of boomer Zelig.

Eventually, the coincidences become foolish. One climatic scene involving a Brexiteer Tory and an urn of ashes contains coincidences that might make a soap opera screenwriter blanch.

However, set aside this ladled-on history and the Dickensian use of coincidence as a plot mechanism, and a wonderfully soulful and meditative book remains behind. We’re presented with the metaphysical horror that awaits 99% of us: “How easy it was to drift though an unchosen life in a succession of reactions to events.” Roland is, like so many of us, simply floating on the sea of history– a speck of living driftwood that passes through creation without leaving any meaning or memory behind.

From there, we’re asked to contemplate the unfathomable track of history as it sweeps us along in its wake. You can taste the irony in sentences such as this: “By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling wall to the storming of the American Capitol.”

McEwan comes with a style that understandably creaks under the weight of the message he wishes to convey. Yet his purpose is of such import, his stylistic slips must be excused.