Thank. you to netgalley and the publisher for the arc!
Decent read. Enjoyed the characters. Character development is an important feature which was good.

Lessons is a historical fiction that follows Roland Baines life over 70 years, beginning from the 1950s and spanning into present day in the 2020s. Having experienced trauma throughout his life, the novel explores how these events have shaped Baines’s character, choices, and relationships against the backdrop of historical events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons is a profound and rich story that explores the novel’s title in depth about what lessons we learn from.

Thank you to Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

For a book titled "Lessons", this one surely has a lot of pages that serve as a sore reminder of forgetting one lesson - that of brevity, it could have benefitted from. The latter clearly missing from an overlong, circuitous and meandering tale of one man, and one woman, and another woman, and of the Second World War, and of British Politics, and of the Chernobyl disaster as seen from the eyes of the British public, and of another woman...

Seriously though, the story of Roland Baines is told in overlapping, criss-crossing and dense prose that more likely resembles the mind of the septuagenarian Roland than it does the work of a prolific and much-lauded, award-winning author.

There are many absolutely gorgeous parts that shine ever so brightly, leaving you breathless and wanting for more, and before you can catch your breath (!), suddenly the narrative shifts and you're decades in the past, and Roland is much younger. Many times, the story has these rather sudden shifts that you'd miss if you're not looking out for them - in one line Roland is talking to a Detective Inspector about his missing wife who has abandoned her husband and seven-month baby Lawrence, while in the next line - without so much as a line break - the story punches through time and years, and you find yourself listening to Roland's father, Captain Robert Baines, a distant and cold father to Roland while Roland's mother carries on a melancholy that Roland sees but is only able to understand years (and hundreds of pages!) later.

Without going into spoilers (in all fairness, that term shouldn't apply to this story - but to give credit where it's due), there are elements of family and extended family and relationships that are explored in tender poignancy, while Roland - in all his blithering naivety - struggles to give meaning and do justice to the book's title by collecting life lessons from events that happen all around him, sometimes to him too, but often he is just a bystander. A rather appropriately depicted incident in the beginning of the book shows Roland and his father witness a traffic accident, and the way Roland interacts with the events, how and what he chooses to retain in his memories from that day depicts an image that kept coming back to me, and in fact came back to Roland as well more than once in the course of the book - an image of really a bystander, but one who is simply unable to discern the separation between him and the events surrounding him, and instead goes on to make impressions and later-in-life-recollections that make for some impossibly large and imaginary influences on his thoughts, character, personality - while he doesn't really have any deed of his own to show for all that learning.

Towards the end, talking to another character, he is reminded "Nothing Matters", and even then all Roland chooses to hear and think about is something else that's said just prior to that rather disdainful and yet quite obviously painful declaration.

There is a long section on his mother-in-law, and her escapades during WW2, with a generous sprinkling of the legend of The White Rose, and just like in many other sections, there is repeated and I felt rather gratuitous use of names of real historical figures - most of which added nothing to Roland's story.

The explosive start of the story - with Roland's piano teacher show promise in the beginning, but even there the actual decision to end things - when it comes, is rather abrupt, and bewilderingly easy and quick. For someone as manipulative and controlling, the letting go seemed oddly misplaced. Similarly, the space given to Roland's wife - Alyssa's - books is nearly impossible to justify. There is a lot of effort put in by Mr. McEwan in coming up with this meta aspect of the novel, by putting in complete storylines, plots, reviews and even excerpts of Alyssa's books - that, again, add hardly anything to Roland's narrative.

All in all, a disappointing tale that, while clearly has flashes of brilliance, eventually suffers from a few lessons too many!

As I’ve enjoyed other books by McEwan, I was deeply disappointed that I found it difficult here to get fully engaged with the story and struggled to finish it. I’m not sure why I never felt any type of connection, perhaps it was just too long. Or it felt that way.

When readers meet Roland Baines, the protagonist of Lessons, his wife has just left him with their baby right as the Chernobyl disaster is unfolding. This is not the first woman who has wronged Roland. In the process of grieving what he has lost, Roland reflects on his childhood. Born in Tripoli to British parents stationed there after World War II, he is sent at a young age to boarding school in England, where he is seduced and taken advantage of at the age of fourteen by his young piano teacher. Convinced that the world is about to end during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Roland finds himself ensnared in a relationship that destroys his school life and charts him on a nonlinear path. As he grows, Roland lives through a span of extraordinary events but never does much with his life, bouncing from one thing to the next, raising his son, getting by. He has opinions on the world, but is mostly a passive observer, which can sometimes be a bit dry. Although McEwan’s quality of writing is superb, I thought that he was trying to do too much with this book, which spanned not just the 20th century but also through the pandemic. The central drama of the plot, the inappropriate relationship with the piano teacher, felt simultaneously important and unnecessary to the larger story. I kept waiting for McEwan to connect the dots between this event and the rest of his life in a more cohesive way, but it never arrived. Instead, Roland appears to be a man who is the victim of various women - his mother’s absence, the piano teacher, his ex-wife - and unable to get out of a rut to live anything more than a mundane existence.

In this rather traditionally (but expertly so) rendered narrative, McEwan remixes parts of his own life experiences to ponder what influences a person's development and destiny throughout their lives. Main character Roland is a drifter whose life has been impacted by the decisions of two women: For one, there is his piano teacher, who starts sexually abusing him when he is 14 - for the rest of his life, Roland is not able to clearly categorize this experience. Then, there is his first wife Alissa, the mother of his son, who leaves him and the 7-month-old infant behind to fulfill her ambition to become a writer. Still, these traumatic events do not fully define Roland; rather, he is often torn between using his agency and letting things slide, trying to get by as a pianist, a tennis coach or a poet. Overall, McEwan shows the life of a more or less ordinary man who stumbles through life while being impacted by personal tragedies and also, to some degree, historic events that reverberate in his direct surroundings.

These connections between the personal and the political are played out regarding all characters in the family: Roland's father works for the military, he spends his first years in Singapore and Libya; Alissa's father was connected to the Nazi resistance group Weiße Rose; both men treat their wives badly. The son is born in 1986, the year of Chernobyl; Roland is in Berlin in 1989 when the wall comes down. Twice, Roland is confronted with police investigations: First, he is suspected to be connected to the disappearance of his first wife; then, he is (rightfully) suspected to be the victim of sexual abuse by his piano teacher.

McEwan has written an epic story, his longest novel yet, and it really takes a careful and patient reader to follow him through this elaborate, detailed panorama. Of course, it is extremely well written, and to illuminate the life lines of an average person is the whole point, but I was not the perfect match as a reader: I was longing for a little more drive, more concise writing.

Nevertheless, Ian McEwan is clearly one of the best British writers working today.

I could not finish enough of this book to be able to leave a comprehensive review, but I hope it finds its audience and I am grateful to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

I liked this book because it kept me engaged. I could understand Roland’s confusion when he had the interlude with his piano teacher, and the difficulty caring for an infant when his wife left him. Twice rejected , he does finally seem to come to grips with his life and moves on.

Unfortunately, I abandoned this book after 60% and several months.

I enjoyed the beginning, the main character’s childhood and school days, I had also been enjoying the mystery of where the main character’s wife is… until it seems to be resolved too abruptly.

However, as the book progressed it really got bogged down in history and politics and I found the Germany parts to be tedious. The jumping around in time also got a little confusing.

Perhaps if it had been shorter, I would have finished this book – I’ve enjoyed many Ian McEwan novels and was enjoying parts of this one – but my reading time is too short and too precious.

The focus of this book is Roland, an Englishman who does not have a lot of direction or motivation, but his early childhood piano lessons prove to be formative. This Ian McEwan novel is a bit slower than his others, but beautifully written. It takes about 100 pages to truly get into the plot, so don’t give up- enjoy the writing until then. Learning about Roland’s relationship with the people around him lets you form many different opinions of him. Like him or not, though, this in an interesting read. I would have rated it higher, but it took me too long to get “into” this 400 page book.
Thank you NetGalley for a ARC.

Lessons is a story of childhood sexual abuse of a boy by a woman. The boy is an adolescent, experiencing all the normal adolescent boy desires, and is easily seduced by his teacher who has planned this abuse for a number of years. We learn the details bit by bit as the story goes back and forth from present-day to revisited memories. Roland has buried the shame and excitement of his abuse but he is unable to focus in his life. Damage has been done. He lives his life amid the backdrop of the cold war, afraid to look too closely into why he makes the decisions he does. His wife abandons him and their infant son to write a best-seller, attaining Roland’s dream while leaving him stuck. Despite its subject, this is a beautiful story. McEwan’s talent for building the intimate lives of families in the context of their circumstances in history and societal norms is extraordinary. This is a long read, and it was painful at times. Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the opportunity to provide an unbiased review in exchange for an advance copy.

This one wasn’t for me, unfortunately. I love On Chesil Beach, Atonement, Nutshell, and other McEwan books, but I didn’t connect with this novel. The writing was without humor, and meandered around a story rather than telling it. I found Roland a little tiresome.

Let me start by saying I love Ian McEwan. I've always enjoyed his writing style, and the stories he creates. Sadly, Lessons was not for me. I tried to read it but couldn't get into the writing. I decided to try it in audio once it was out. While the first chapter had me engaged, I almost immediately lost interest close to the end. I kept pushing through, but ultimately DNF'd around the 20% mark. I couldn't connect to Roland, and while it was incredibly descriptive, I found myself bored.

I'm sure I'll be in the minority here because I've already seen some pretty great reviews of it, and maybe I'll go back to it someday. But right now, it's not for me.

Thank you to Knopf Publishing and NetGalley for the eARC and for providing me with the opportunity to provide my honest opinion.

DNF at 24%
The writing was descriptive and beautiful but it was too tedious for me and I couldn’t find myself connecting with Roland at all which made the tedium not worth it

Ian McEwan’s newest novel breaks down a lot of mores surrounding our culture in the vibrancy of the twentieth century. It is chronologically thematic as much as it is emotionally jarring as McEwan turns the tides of abuse to reflect the rarely seen ways in which men can be just as the victims of emasculation and use by women as women are. This is a book of a life of a man whose confusing sexual and emotional abuse in his childhood becomes a vein that runs through the rest of his life’s experiences and choices, oftentimes not entirely sure as to why he is making the decisions he is that are sure to self-sabotage his future.

As a child, Rolan Baines is exposed to manipulative sexual encounters by his much older piano teacher. To him, they are confounding and even exciting, completely unaware that he was only one of many victims of the predatory female teacher. He reflects on this as he also tries to raise his son in a consistent and loving environment without his son’s mother who abandoned them to pursue a free literary and artistic life abroad. Every action Baines pursues in his professional, personal, familial, and sexual life seems to stem from a series of abandonments completely rooted in his own trauma. In the search for happiness and his own redemption, he is left with many more questions than answers on a road to disappointment and confusion with what little in his life he finds rewarding. Combine this with unavoidable social, geopolitical, and local events of the 20th Century, and Baines is stuck living with his face just above the surface of the water, trying to keep himself and his son afloat as his past tries to pull him underwater for good.

I really enjoyed this book. McEwan is back to his lofty prose and complex interiority that I enjoyed from his earlier novels. As a novelist who often uses the fallout of a striking trauma to guide the deep characterization and events of his stories, this one is a bit more subtle than some of the others. Lessons is a study of a man living in a world where he has found himself surrounded by misandrists that don’t care or respect him, and in many ways, it is his choices based on his past and the events of the world around him that have led him to find himself in relationship and social quandary after quandary. McEwan’s prose is exquisite, and he can incorporate the events of Baines’ pre-connected world into the modern with ease and grace, but no clear answers. Being a novel about the abuse and subjugation of men, specifically men that are in touch with their emotional identity after suffering serious traumas and barely making it through in a world that everyone seems to think is built for them, I thought this piece is necessary and timely today. McEwan is a master, as always.

This tome took me so long to get through. This felt like a huge understanding, documenting Roland’s life - his pitfalls, strengths, ambitions, and mistakes. It was a lot. I will say many portions of this felt…extra long and drug out, but the ending gave me exactly what I needed after chugging along and working through this. I felt like it was a bit too long - not necessarily in pages but just drawn out sections of the same old same old.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

McEwan is a master, this book is a masterpiece. I loved every single word. This book is so good and I just want to forgot it and read it again. And than again. And than again.
I cannot describe how good this book is. Please read it and than talk to me about it.
Love love love!

Thanks Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC!

I love Ian McEwan. I did not, however, love this book. It felt very stuffy to me, and I did not finish.

While I have read and enjoyed Ian McEwan in the past, I just could not get into this book. The beginning was painfully slow and just did not grab me. Perhaps in the future it will resonate with me. DNF.

DNF. Interesting premise, but the beginning dragged and I couldn’t get into the story. Will appeal to fans of Ian McEwan’s previous work.