When Roland reports Alissa missing, he is questioned by a constable who seems to suspect that he has murdered her, but postcards from her show that she is alive but does not want to be found. Roland is “the baby’s bed and his god.” Alissa, Roland’s wife, has vanished, leaving a note telling him not to find her. The story begins in medias res, with Roland Baines, in his home in Clapham, waking from a nightmare about his boyhood piano lessons, and realizing that he is now a grown man taking care of his infant son, Lawrence. In particular, the Cuban Missile Crisis, German war guilt, and the Chernobyl disaster influence his actions, with life-changing consequences. Like all human beings, he shapes his own destiny, but under circumstances created by the past. In Lessons, the Second World War and the Cold War (especially the nuclear threat) hover over Roland’s generation.

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, for example, or Thomas Hardy’s depiction of 19 th century agricultural mechanization destroying the old rural social code in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.)

(One thinks of how the Napoleonic Wars and British imperialism in India feature in W.M. Readers familiar with the great realistic novels of the 19 th and 20 th century, in which historical events affect the characters’ fates, will be able to appreciate Lessons. (The time frame extends from World War II to the present day.) Other reviewers criticized Lessons for being too realistic – not sufficiently innovative or experimental. Some reviewers of Ian Mc Ewan’s new novel, Lessons, suggest that the central character, Roland Baines, is a whining, privileged loser who never really got his act together, and claim that the novel lacks action and includes too much history. Dalloway when in my twenties, but it was not until years later, after reaching the age of the central character in Woolf’s novel, that I could relate to her emotions and concerns. One of the advantages of growing older is an ability to comprehend literature that seemed puzzling or irrelevant in younger days.

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