I began this novel with high expectations. McEwan is to fiction what Ronnie O’Sullivan is to a snooker table, a yarn spinner top class. He can construct brilliant word breaks with breathtaking speed. He can detect angles of Human Nature most of us are blind to and pocket them so cleanly from seemingly impossible distances that you spectate in awe of his genius. Yet after 107 pages and three chapters I am beginning to wonder if Macker is losing his cue action?

It’s not that there aren’t some amazingly bold breaks of descriptive prose, for instance this description of Roland being awakened by Laurence’s cry of pain: “what must it be, to burst out of deep infant sleep into the shocking singular fact of existence? everything unknown about the world, little to know it with. In that thin tapering sound, utter loneliness. A human shout.” It’s that the actual narrative process is unwieldy, like a massive juggernaut that keeps wandering off the motorway down long windy minor lanes of laborious exposition. Where the hell are we heading to? I keep wondering.

At initial break off Roland is having insomniac memories of his boarding school piano teacher. She is a stern alluring woman who seems to have a pedophiliac interest in him – or maybe that crotch rubbing incident was just an accident? certainly she becomes a centre of his sexual fantasy life. We are located in the immediate post-war baby boomer decades and here in this repressive you can almost smell the semen institution there is quite enough material on its own to drive the story forward – but no sooner is my lubricious curiosity aroused in this manipulative relationship than it is displaced by one digression after another.

An Adult future tense arrives. The carnally precocious kid has grown up, got married. But why has Roland’s wife, Alissia, done a runner? They have a baby. Surely that’s not the reason? A bovine copper arrives to investigate the mystery disappearance . Who is Roland anyway? off we go down the Libyan back road of army dad and upbringing in Tripoli. So who is Roland’s wife and her family? That journey takes us deep into German territory and the Savage history of the Nazis. En route we take a detour into literary London, briefly meet luminaries like Cyril Connolly and George Orwell and learn all about the White Rose resistance movement and the expressionist painters who Hitler brands as degenerates. This is all very interesting and call me shallow if you will but I am still lusting after that sweet smelling piano teacher to whom my attention was initially drawn and who now seems to have been forgotten along the way. Surely all these very disparate characters and events will be somehow drawn together eventually – but for the life of me I cannot see how and my patience is wearing thin.

Then suddenly it’s Chapter 4 and we’re on the M1 again, back at the boarding school and the Cuban missile crisis is taking place. Somebody mentions to Roland that they all might be vaporised before he can have it (meaning sex) . So at half term he goes off to see Miriam the teacher on his bike and after a spat of foreplay, or Mozart as it’s known amongst musicologists, Roland is invited by her to climb into bed. Miriam is punctilious, especially about his hygiene. She’s quite a saucy go-getting modern cock sucking wash-the-spunk-out-of-your foreskin type of woman. Even serves him a post-coital roast dinner. Roland afterwards however feels a bit cheated. Was the meat undercooked? No. The world would go on, he realises, and he would remain unvaporised. That’s adolescent gratitude for you!!

Now it’s chapter 5 and we’re back in the present again, or the future depending on how you look at things. Three years gone by and no sign of his wife Alissia. Roland’s idea of becoming a poet gone to the scrapheap. But he’s made a lot of money writing clever doggerel on greetings cards. He’s been through 5 more women but nobody has stuck. The boychild Lawrence occasionally wonders about mummy. So do I for that matter. It is hinted Roland’s affair with the music teacher ended traumatically and turned him into a voracious sex addict. Anyway he goes off on a jolly to Berlin and watches the revelries as the wall comes down. Then he magically bumps into Alissia in a bar. She’s written a novel and gives him a copy. She tells him she had to leave because her life was going down the pan just like her mum’s before her. She didn’t want to become a failed writer like mutti did, living out a boring domestic existence with her sex addict husband. Roland begins reading the novel and is amazed how good it is. It’s not just good, it’s a fucking masterpiece! ……….Unlike Ian McEwan’s novel LESSONS which right now is at best mildly interesting. I am only halfway through and all these self-obsessed hyper intense morally perplexed characters are boring me. Should I jump ship now? No, because McEwan can write properly good sentences even though this story has become overloaded with rehashed geopolitical windbaggery and the mawkish whining of the middle-class liberal conscience. To summarise what’s disappointing me so far is: the lack of a clear and concise sense of narrative direction, the absence of any working class character, the failure to discuss the distinction between lust and love. However with 250 pages to go some, if not all of that, may still be rectified…..AT THIS STAGE I TAKE TEN DAYS OFF TO CLEAR MY HEAD OF THE RUBBLE

In chapter 7 Miriam the daemonic dominatrix plots to marry Roland on his 16th birthday. He’s failed all his O levels and has nothing but a future of erotic bliss before him. So what does he do? No brainer! He instantly leaves her, the school, the music and gets a job labouring as a navvie in Aldershot. But for me the spotlight is now on her. She’s by a mile the most interesting character. What bizarre social forces create a woman like that? Come on Ian, time to make her the star of the show! But chapter 8 fails to deliver. Instead we’re back to the middle-aged post Alissia Roland. Her literary success and single-minded ambition continues to remind him what a vacillating dilettante and failure he is. He becomes Daphne’s lover, his dad dies, Daphne goes back to Peter the fuckwit and new Labour comes to power. There are some further hints that he puts women off because he’s an obsessive shagging machine in search of ever better orgasms. Is that Miriam’s fault? Maybe chapter 9 will now enlighten us…….Five years have flashed by, Lawrence is a gangly adolescent, Blair and Bush are about to wreak revenge on Saddam Hussein to irrationally get even for the twin towers demolition. Roland goes in search of Miriam, prompted by a copper from the Met sex crimes squad. This plot line all seemed UTTERLY contrived to me. 40 years later and out of the blue the old bill decides to go after a female predator nobody has even lodged a complaint about? Give me a break! Anyway McEwan has decided he wants a showdown between our chief protagonists so he manipulates the story to create it – and to be fair it turns out to be one of the most gripping scenes so far as Miriam tries desperately to eat humble pie. I found her post abortion story credible and moving. As I finished the chapter it was however with the gut feeling she would soon be topping herself. I want the novel to end here and now. I’ve had enough of whingeing Roland, his leftier than thou genteelly impoverished friends and his too far up her own selfish arse ex wife……… In chapter 10 Alissia writes a memoir vilifying her parents, Roland moves from 55 to early 60’s, finds he has a secret brother given away at birth and hooks up again with Daphne after her Brexiteer husband leaves once again. Roland has decided, if not to forgive Miriam, to at least overlook her crimes. She rewired your brain, remarks someone. He’s keeping notebook diaries – as a substitute for proper creative writing, it’s implied. His mum dies and his brand new brother Robert attends the funeral. Daphne announces she has stage 4 cancer. Do I care? Not really but here comes chapter 11 in which the sheer detailed quality of the writing about the process of dying and attending to the dying forces me to change my opinion. Roland rages against church mythology, its opposition to science and its involvement in preventing euthanasia from being legalised. I loved those passages…….. Seven years pass and Roland has become a doddering old fart doting on his memories and grandchildren. Alissia publishes another novel in which she appears to accuse Roland of beating her up. He goes off to the lake district to scatter Daphne’s ashes and who shows up but her loathsome europhobic ex hubby, Peter, now a minister in Johnson’s government! Of course they have a fight and Roland loses. You ineffectual stupid do-gooding twat, I thought to myself. Peter fights dirty! He’s feral! He’s one of Boris’s boys! So I moved on swiftly to the final chapter. I’m still pining for Miriam. Has she been written out of the story? So bad on the author’s part if she has! Okay I’m contradicting myself. No matter, Roland in between Covid lockdowns sets off to Germany to confront the now one footed Alissia. Personally I couldnt give a fuck about this awful monocentric woman and I’m just hoping she’s having a lesbian affair with Miriam or Miriam’s daughter or even better Miriam’s 3 footed dog. But no, she’s only dying of lung cancer. She tells him her new novel is entirely made up and he’s a dozy prick for assuming otherwise. This is a dud note to me. Roland may have many twattish flaws but he is very well read and wouldnt make such an amateurish mistake. It’s really the author telling his sycophantic fan club not to treat this book as an autobiography, even though there are a few similarities between McEwan’s and Roland’s life….. Roland sees a doctor and discovers he may be fat, prediabetic, arthritic, bald and unbalanced but his heart is okay and he should be good to potter around for a few years yet. Lawrence refuses an invitation to see his mum and she sends him his grandma’s White Rose notebooks, worth a fortune. Roland burns all his. He’s created a photo gallery of his abject life and even begrudgingly put a shot of Miriam in there. The book ends with his reflections on the recent past and its geopolitical disappointments. He worries about what the 21st century might bring for the young ones. Not so much a story ending as a petering out into question marks, an elegy for feckless humanity.

Overall there were many things in the novel I liked but it was far too long and often lost narrative momentum. I didn’t much like Roland, especially his bleak materialist overly earnest view of life, and felt he was just a tool McEwan used to bombard the reader with his own political and cultural preoccupations. A leaner story half the length with most of the historical and literary wank omitted would have worked better for me. McEwan has some good ideas but also quite a few half-baked ones. A good editor should have insisted on the cuts needed to transform the novel into a genuine page turner. More Miriam and less of the other bit part players including Roland himself. There’s no question that Macker is a 5 star wordsmith though. Even when his subject matter becomes tedious his prose is beautifully crafted. He is a writer’s writer and knocks spots off all the second and third raters who tend a bit too frequently to crop up on our book club reading agenda. I guess he wanted this novel to be an epic saga, Tolstoyan in range, from birth to almost death, a masculine life studied in all its movements, epiphanies and mistakes. It doesn’t have Tolstoy’s narrative control and fluency and existential range, however. It is too personal, too narrow, too close to the author’s own life, even though the author tries to pretend otherwise. He should be more interested in Miriam’s story and less in Roland’s. Miriam is the most interesting antiheroine I’ve come across since Lady MacBeth. She dwarfs Roland in charisma and psychological complexity but she’s virtually wasted here. In soccer terms it’s a bit like sticking Eric Cantona in goal. But Macker is a literary giant and no mere editor is going to dare suggest revisions or cut him down to size. He’d just take his manuscript elsewhere. He’s a publisher’s goldmine. That is how the economic cookie crumbles in the fiction trade. Reader beware! If Macker publishes a sequel centred on Miriam I’ll be the first to buy it. In the meantime I’ll be content with wet dreams – or even better write the sequel myself….. After I finished scribbling this diary I took a look at the Guardian review of the book. It ends a bit like this:

Lessons is a portrait of sociopolitical entropy, a lesson in squandering……..McEwan’s sights are aimed squarely at the generation to which he belongs: those postwar children who “lolled on history’s aproned lap, nestling into a little fold of time, eating all the cream”. Roland is a prototypical baby boomer: raised by war-haunted veterans, loved at arm’s length, and schooled in “nuanced loutishness”…………But 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.”
3 stars ***