Lessons by Ian McEwan, one novel with way too many ideas. Individually the different prose could have been exceptional. But I was left wanting, left confused and left wondering if I just listened to all of that, for ‘all of that’. (Side note, I may have enjoyed this a lot less due to having the ARC from NetGalley on Audio, for me, with literary novels audios don’t always connect (personally)). 

Rewinding now, Roland Baines… Let me start by saying the premise of starting the book when his life is all but falling part and then going back to his childhood and onwards to adulthood, had the foundations to be really interesting. Especially given that early on you are thrown into a highly immoral situation with his female piano teacher… I’m just going to say sexually assaulting him. As a young teen he believes himself to be in love and believes that she too loves him. This is off the back of been abandoned to a boarding school and receiving carless, loveless letters from his mother. In other words, this novel is about childhood trauma, that should have moved me to my core. 

 

There is so much to unpack with what Roland went though and as a result how he lives out the rest of his life. Roland’s childhood “Distorted his relations with women”. And although you follow him on many of those relationships you don’t really get a deep and meaningful insight into any of them. On top of that, coinciding with the stream-of-consciousness of his tumultuous but utterly stagnate daily life you come across larger matters such as everything from World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and finish with the Pandemic…. As well as, following what his run a way wife Alissa was up to, how she found herself, became a successful novelist and so on… So much happens, but none of it moved me. 

 

In summary, I love books that are purely an interesting stream-of-consciousness, especially if the charter is going through major emotional growth. I also love books on World War II, and major political moments in history…. Something about Roland as a character and the backdrop of this book was just too stale for me.  The writing style was long winded and tedious at the best of times. Ian McEwan’s, Atonement is one of my favorite books of all time, so I never expected to be wishing for this book to end. On that note, the ending does pick up but I’m rating this book on my overall experience from start to finish, not how I felt when I finished it.