Novelist Ian McEwan Explores The ‘Lessons’ Of Modern Morality

British novelist Ian McEwan has penned two new works: a fictional one about the life of one Roland Baines, and a truncated history of the last 75 years spanning World War II to Covid. The problem is that both are contained within the same novel, “Lessons.”

McEwan has gracefully straddled literary acclaim and popular embrace for an impressive portion of those years. Adaptations of his award-winning novels, including “Atonement,” also make surprisingly frequent appearances at the movie house, with three adaptations released in 2017 alone.

“Lessons,” his 18th novel, opens with some light sadism while introducing us to Roland as an 11-year-old, nervous-fingered piano student in 1959, cursed with an “idiot thumb.” He is intimately pinched by his imperious piano teacher Miriam Cornell, leaving a metaphorical bruise that will last his whole life.

That relationship becomes an erotic obsession for both. Demanding, jazz-hating, perhaps insane, Miriam’s relationship with the boy may or may not have warped him for life. Much space is devoted to Roland trying to answer that question.

After Egypt’s Col. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Roland and his British Army family are forced to flee Libya to England. McEwan’s own military family traveled in similar fashion. He says “Lessons” is his most biographical novel.

Once in England, Roland is hastily placed into boarding school, dragooned into piano lessons, and then has his brain forever “rewired” by his piano teacher, who eventually initiates him into sex, a macabre event hastened by Roland’s teenage fatalism over what he fears may be the end of the world (the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis). Throughout “Lessons,” McEwan is reminding us how large-scale historic events also irrevocably affect individual lives. But is that thought as profound as McEwan tries to make it?

Roland is ceaselessly summing up his aimless life — tennis coach, hotel lounge pianist, writer of cheeky greeting card verse — and finding it wanting. Frankly, it doesn’t sound like a riveting read, although McEwan’s genius with sentence-making takes us far, as when Roland lifts himself from his navel-gazing long enough to marvel over his squalling infant son Lawrence, after his wife Alissa has disappeared on them both: “Were Lawrence’s joys and sorrow separated by the finest gauze? Not even that. They were wrapped up tight together.”

He has conflicted feelings about Alissa’s debut novel, which he must admit is fabulous: How can someone so awful write so wonderfully, “and are we more tolerant the greater the art?”

McEwan’s previous novels, often short, cast readers into exquisitely rendered milieus paired with an incisive understanding of his characters. That understanding still abides, but this time the author is squeezing over half a century of history into a single novel, and even at 431 pages there’s not enough room to air things out properly. Roland himself is no mover or shaker, merely providing internal dialogue by rendering secondhand news accounts of major events, although he does accidentally pop up in Berlin for a fateful reunion the very night the Berlin Wall tumbles.

The historical knowledge is not properly