I have been reading Ian McEwan’s work since the late 1970s or early 1980s. Looking through my bookshelves I found a signed first edition of The Comfort of Strangers that I bought when it was published in England in 1981. I think I have read pretty much everything since then. Novels he has published in recent years have tended to be disappointing, lacking either the great sweep of works like Atonement or the affecting intimacy of The Child in Time. I had started to wonder if his interest had moved to places to which I had no desire to follow him, and then along came Lessons. It’s that unusual and, I suspect, unfashionable thing, a whole life story that follows its central character from his boyhood in the 1950s to old age in the Covid lock down.

Roland Baines has an ordinary, unremarkable life. He leaves school as soon as he can and drifts from job to job, finally settling into a routine of playing the piano in the restaurant of a London hotel and writing verses and epigrams for greeting cards. His life is not something he directs or shapes through the exercise of choice or will. It’s more a series of responses to events that happen to him. But two of those events are extraordinary by any measure. At the age of fourteen he starts a sexual relationship with his boarding school piano teacher, Miriam Cornell. Much later, his wife vanishes mysteriously, leaving him alone to raise their newborn son.

To what extent does anyone control their life? What influence do the great historical events really have on us? How much is determined by our parents, the circumstances of our birth and our upbringing? Is it the big choices we make, or the apparently trivial ones, that really matter in the long run? McEwan, perhaps with a compassion, indulgence, and wisdom that only comes with age, makes few judgements about Roland Baines and his remarkable (and unremarkable) life. And that’s just one of the things that makes Lessons so special.