Ian McEwan’s Anti-Memoir
Ian McEwan, slumped on a comfortable couch in the large formal sitting room of his Cotswolds manor house, dazzling early-summer sun filtering through the tall, narrow windows, tells me he has been suffering from a protracted bout of pessimism. “I got totally obsessed with Russia invading Ukraine,” he says, an unfamiliar note of pain in his voice. “From February onwards, it filled my thoughts. Massacres in small villages northeast of Kyiv, like curling black-and-white photographs. Suddenly it’s here again—unbelievable, merciless brutality; old ladies shot in their kitchens.” He rubs his eyes (hay fever). A barbaric assault on European complacency, the invasion has reminded him how close we are, all of us, to annihilation.
Aware of his good fortune, of his plush surroundings, he acknowledges “an enormous amount of local happiness” cushioning his geopolitical gloom. Lockdown, perversely liberating, was midwife to his 17th novel, Lessons: “It was one of the most pleasant writing experiences I’ve ever had. The stillness here, the long walks, writing every day, seven days a week, 10 hours a day.” The result is his longest book and among his most engrossing, an exploration of a lifetime and an era, the 70-year stretch from the postwar decade to the present day, the bruised and battered Pax Americana. One of the many questions the novel poses: “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?”
Lessons thrives on the interplay between seismic global events—the Cold War, Chernobyl, Brexit, COVID-19—and private lives, in particular that of Roland Baines, an alter ego whose parents, siblings, childhood, and early education are all minutely modeled on McEwan’s own. On the brink of adolescence, Ian’s and Roland’s paths diverge. The alter ego suffers a trauma that knocks him off course; thereafter, everything he does and everything done to him begs to be measured against the real-life experience of the author. Life and counterlife: Roland’s mid-30s marital disaster is a funhouse distortion of the gradual collapse of McEwan’s first marriage and the bruising, much publicized custody battle that followed. Whereas McEwan moved on and flourished, Roland floundered.
In his early 70s, having drifted ineffectually through several freelance careers, Roland pictures himself as “the bald and porcine nonentity with the disappointed air.” McEwan, whose hairline has retreated and who nurtures, just shy of his 74th birthday, a modest paunch, carries himself with the easy confidence of that rare writer who is both a serial best seller and a prize-bedecked darling of the critics. Calm, rational, unhurried, he fixes you with a steady eye, narrowed occasionally to a quizzical squint, his gaze the physiological equivalent of his lucid, neat, economical prose. His wry good humor suggests that he’s a stranger to disappointment
