User:GrahamHardy/Carol Topolski

Lessons is a novel by English author Ian McEwan. It was published in 2022 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Alfred A. Knopf in the US.

Plot
Struggling poet Roland Baines looks back on his life with containing numerous various flashbacks. He and his parents lived in British Army barracks near Tripoli for six years. In 1959 they travelled to England to send him to a boarding school near Ipswich on the banks of the Orwell. His parents then returned to Libya. By the age of twelve he began having piano lessons with his tutor Miriam Cornell at the boarding school, as he fantasized about her. Two years later he came to her cottage in Erwarton during the Cuba Crisis where they became lovers. The school believed that they were practising piano duets. He failed his O-levels.

After leaving school he spent an aimless decade, then he spent a couple of years in Berlin. Roland's wife Alissa's mother Jane, revealed in her journals that after the war she went to Munich to write an article on the 'White Rose' for Horizon. There she met her Heinrich, who showed her the Der Blaue Reiter Alamanac and never completed the article. She fell pregnant, they married and moved to Murnau and later to Liebenau near Nienberg.

His wife Alissa disappeared to Europe leaving their baby Lawrence with him as she sent him postcards to Roland. The Police suspect that he could have murdered his wife, and was interviewed by DI Douglas Browne as radiation spreads from the Chernobyl disaster. Roland tried to seal his house from radiation. Shortly Roland travels to Berlin after the fall of the wall, where he finds Alissa, who told him that she was repeating her mother's failures and that she would become successful author.

Roland then marries his old friend Daphne but she soon dies with cancer. Eventually takes her ashes to the Lake District but her ex-husband meets him there...

The novel ends with him making separate contacts with both Miriam and Alissa.

Reception

 * Beejay Silcox writing in The Guardian concludes: 'it's the female characters – from joyful children to art monsters – who give this novel its heft and verve (and perhaps its title). Next to them, McEwan's everyman feels a little gormless and grey. There's Miss Cornell, of course, with her piano lessons and her terrifying thrall; and Roland's timorous mother, whose cast-iron silences hide a story of wartime shame. There's Roland's best friend, who teaches him how to die; and his mother-in-law, who – for the briefest of moments – lives the life she wanted. And then there is Alissa, Roland's first wife, who chooses her writerly ambitions over motherhood, and leaves him in embittered awe. Roland learns from them all, lesson after lesson, everything from the demands of genius to the virtue of a clean kitchen table. It's a wearying trope: women as instruments and catalysts of male insight. But as Roland's granddaughter reminds him: "A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson."
 * Molly Young from The New York Times finishes with "One way to read Lessons is as a self-repudiation of the manoeuvre at which McEwan has become virtuosic. More authors should repudiate their virtuosity. The results are exciting. Decades after Roland’s last sighting of Miriam, a police officer appears at his door. “A whole new culture” has arisen, the cop explains. Miriam could go to jail for her crimes. But Roland isn't sure the proposed punishment fits the crime. His mind is a “tipping falling tumult” of contrary notions: The relationship provided joy and erotic purpose; it corrupted him; he was complicit; no, not complicit — complicity is shorthand for a victim's customary self-blame. Did Miriam destroy him? Was it possible to be destroyed and not know it? And, title in mind, what lessons has Roland learned? From women, perhaps not much. From the newspapers, that history's unfurling exists independent of a novelist’s desire to plot and signify. Lucky, then, that Roland has McEwan on his side.' Ian McEwan Returns With a Tale of Adolescent Lust and Adult Lassitude Retrieved 21/5/2023.</ref