In their physical absence, Roland invents the power of these female characters. There is something suspicious about this narrative set-up. Who is to blame? And what is the point of the pain? From these formative betrayals by women – one a controlling sadist and one an absconder – Roland tries to extract some answers. His wife Alissa is missing and he is a suspect in her disappearance. But the world goes on, and so does their intoxicating and destructive relationship.Ī narrative leap locates these memories in the mind of the adult Roland, a sleep-deprived father to a young infant. He wants to experience sex before he is “vaporised” by nuclear war. She styles this abuse as a lesson.Īs an isolated and obsessed 14 year old, Roland seeks out Miriam during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It would never let him leave.” His piano teacher, Miriam, pinches the boy’s thigh, slips her fingers towards his crotch, and strikes his knee with the edge of a ruler. Bach’s prelude seems to the 11-year-old Roland “like a pine forest in winter his private labyrinth of cold sorrow. Lessons begins with a piano lesson remembered with sensory immediacy. The solipsism and pathos of this project are on display, along with a glimmer of grace.
Roland is attempting to make sense of his life as lessons – stories of cause and effect. The novel’s central character, Roland Baines, reveals a writerly consciousness at work. These hallmarks persist in Lessons, but the inclusion of autobiographical details – like McEwan, the novel’s protagonist grows up in North Africa in a British military family and discovers late in life that he has a brother – is a new experiment in vulnerability.
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