1986. The explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl worries the whole of Europe. In London, a man, Roland Baynes, zealously follows the evolution of the situation, seals his windows and considers leaving the country to protect his 7-month-old baby. For several days, he has been alone to make this kind of decision. His wife, and mother of his son, left, choosing her writing career to the detriment of her family obligations.
To better understand this fissure and put it into perspective, Roland undertakes to delve back into his past; his childhood in Libya with a withdrawn mother and an alcoholic and tyrannical army officer father; his adolescence in an austere boarding school; his piano lessons and his abusive and toxic relationship with the dizzy Miriam Cornell; his passage to adulthood, in Germany, where he dreams of a new world and marries the woman he thinks is the woman of his life.
With Lessons, a seventeenth novel of more than 650 pages, Ian McEwan offers his most ambitious book. Through the journey of a seemingly ordinary man, the British author tells the story of an era lulled by the illusion of progress, but marked by the Cuban missile crisis and the reunification of Europe, through Thatcherism, the AIDS epidemic, the invasion of Iraq, Brexit, the pandemic and the climate crisis.
At the end of the line, Ian McEwan weighs each of his words, carrying a wisdom that only the experience of introspection – and of writing – can explain. “I couldn’t have written this book sooner. I had to have an entire life behind me to carry out this long contemplation, not only of my life, but of my time; more than 70 years that defined a historically very privileged generation. I wanted to replicate this feeling, which we find more often in good biographies than in fiction, which expresses what a life as a whole is. »
The role of the accidental
To Roland, the novelist lent his childhood – an officer father, a long stay in North Africa, a boarding school education and an illegitimate brother given up for adoption – and his literary ambitions, before turning to an exercise in pure fiction, in which he addresses the impacts of small and large events – traumas, social crises, political incidents and instabilities – on the course of an existence. “Roland is the person I could have been if a set of favorable circumstances at the beginning of my life had not allowed me to become a writer. »
He thus continues a reflection already raised in several of his novels, including the popular Atonement (Atonement) And On Chesil Beach (On Chesil Beach), on the role of the accidental in life and the absurdity of the concept of free will. “We are all accidents. If my parents had made love two minutes later, I would be a completely different person. I was in close contact with children who had never been tucked in, to whom they had never read an evening story. They had to learn what the majority take for granted. It is only chance that determines whether we are born into a loving family or a neglectful family, whether we carry more joys than burdens inside us. »
In Lessons, the young Roland is forever marked by a relationship with his piano teacher, when he was only 14 years old. In addition to introducing him to carnal pleasures, Miriam Cornell keeps him under her yoke, forcing him during her visits to wait for her all day in his pajamas, going so far as to lock up his belongings.
“Roland takes a long time to admit the abuse he suffered because he considered himself to be truly in love. With hindsight, he understands that there cannot be consent between an adult and a child. »
This process of going back in thought, becoming aware of identity and questioning one’s own narrative is at the heart of the novel, which reflects the way in which each person rewrites the significant events of their life as their perspective is modified by an experience or an incident that changes the course of the world. “I’m fascinated by the way people tell the same event in two different ways at 30 and 50, for example. The two versions are like two drafts of a final text, and neither is more accurate than the other. It’s as if the logic of literature fits with that of life. »
The fall of optimism
While an intimacy made of small successes and damaged dreams intertwines with the big story, Ian McEwan depicts the slow decline of a world as the baby boomers knew and shaped it; a world full of promise and possibility. “What logic, what motivations, what desperate renunciation could, hour by hour, transport us all into a generation from enthusiastic optimism during the fall of the Berlin Wall to the assault on the American Capitol? » he writes.
Contrary to the plural formula of its title, there is only one moral to remember from Lessons ; that humanity does not learn any, both on an individual and collective level. “Today, when we ask people if they think their children will have a better life than them, many answer no. For my generation, in Europe at least, everything seemed to be going better and better after the calamities of the Second World War. Society was rebuilding itself, determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. I have had access to opportunities that my parents could never have dreamed of. There was a widespread sense of progress. Today, I no longer feel it,” concludes the writer.