Ian McEwan’s novel Lessons. A boomer looks back. Review. – Culture
Could what one youth thought was a love affair have been abuse? Ian McEwan tells a life story too complex for black and white answers.
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Perhaps you have to think of life as a gigantic maze, a tangle of paths that lead to magical glades, or to nowhere, and sometimes to a home. Roland Baines, the hero, or rather: anti-hero in Ian McEwan’s new novel “Lessons”, is a procrastinator at every fork in the road, he ponders where to go until he is pushed on in one direction. Roland’s life, from childhood in Tripoli to the second lockdown in London, falls in an era where free will seems to matter more than any other, offering all the possibilities of a long peace. But what does that mean if you don’t even know what you have decided in life?
