Ian MacEwan - Lessons

Ian MacEwan, Lessons (Johnathan Cape)

Only her title escapes her capacity for brilliant invention,

is what one reviewer says of Alissa Eberhardt's The Journey. In Ian MacEwan's new novel, it's the first novel by the wife that walks out on Roland Baines and their baby, goes to Germany and becomes a Nobel Literature laureate. It could broadly be said of MacEwan's book, too, and the parallel might even be deliberate. With MacEwan you can't quite tell how self-consciously books his books are. His title most obviously refers to the piano lessons Roland has as a schoolboy but could hint at volumes of other lessons to be learnt if one was inclined to let it. That wouldn't be the sort of 'A' level essay I'd not want to do, though, and I hope there is no definitive list to be read as a sub-text.

Those piano lessons are with Miriam Cornell, who isn't as responsible as she might be with her brilliant 14 year old protegee. His motives, on top of those any teenage boy might harbour, are accelerated by the Cuban missile crisis and the idea that the world might end anytime soon. But Miriam is possessive and needs to be escaped from. What follows is Roland's under-achieving career as a hotel lounge pianist, his marriages and families, all of which are related with reference to how world politics and events impinge on their lives.

MacEwan is never short of cultural reference points either with Velvet Underground records given a minor role and the passing reference to Norman MacCaig only outdone, for me, by the mention of Roogalator in Sweet Tooth. It was suggested in an interview that Lessons could be his last novel and, as such, it is one of, if not the, longest as well as among the most convincing alongside Atonement and Sweet Tooth, possibly just behind On Chesil Beach. It almost has the kind of valedictory, summing-up sense in it that is attributed to The Tempest. But if The Tempest wasn't quite the end, neither might this be. After 17 novels, it might be a hard habit to break. But for some of us, who were the right age to read First Love, Last Rites when it was still quite new, he's always been there and it won't be the same without him.

Having eventually taken up Miriam on her invitation in the early 60's, Roland has reason to find her again 40 years on in what is a well-wrought piece of plotting. Yes, she was guilty of that which she could still be charged for but, as Roland is well aware, they are both different people now. One might find correspondances in the story lines of Atonement in which events in childhood cast long shadows over the rest of the lives involved, or The Children Act which examines what responsibility minors have for their own lives but perhaps Lessons reverses both situations.

Alissa's last novel is,

longer than anything she had written,

which again makes us wonder about its relationship with the book we are reading. In it, she finally uses material from her first marriage but Roland is badly mis-represented if it is such. But it isn't, it's fiction and MacEwan is doing what Shakespeare did in Hamlet when the travelling theatre group turn up in Elsinore and reflecting on his own art. It's not the first time he's done that but it might be the last. A page and a half before the end, reading a story with his grand-daughter, he asks,

'Do you think the story is trying to tell us something about people?'

and she doesn't think so.

He saw her point. A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.

I think we could have done without that. The editor might have asked if it was really necessary but maybe you don't ask such questions of a writer of such status. But, as in the story, it's too late now. Things have moved on. Several futures have been and gone since some long ago wrongs and we are busy surviving all the newly-minted ones as they occur. That would be what these lessons don't really teach us but confirm what we knew already.