Another McEwan masterpiece

Ian McEwan’s ‘Lessons’ displays his profound writing skill once again. I thought it was a masterpiece. I am relieved because it has been a while that he wrote such a mesmerizing novel. It affected me greatly and it often was pretty confrontational to me personally. I would assume it to be strongly autobiographical but, then again, it is hard to establish this. Roland, the protagonist, certainly is portrayed as a typical product of the seventies, not ambitious, roaming the world, taking meaningless jobs here and there and not taking that one last step to make his life more successful while he could easily have done so. An ‘almost there’ sort of person, but he is not an unhappy man in general. You could even consider him quite a content person when he got older.

I’ll have to let the novel sink in a bit before I can write a more extensive review. I’ll like to ponder now about some of the symbolisms I think I detected when reading along, such as that bone splinter in his chest or Roland’s easy absolution of the abuse of his piano teacher which forced him to enter upon a new course in his life. And how about the use of the name ‘Roland’! I thought the novel outstanding, perhaps one of his best!