When Ian McEwan began writing his new novel, Lessons, in late 2019, he told his wife, novelist Annalena McAfee, that after a year of traveling he would prefer to spend 2020 at home writing. “Really, you’ve got to watch out what you ask for,” he said when he spoke to WD in July, in advance of the book’s publication. Holed up with part of his family during the first COVID-19 lockdown in England, he knew he wanted to “write a fairly long novel and just sort of live inside it.” Because the conditions were “horribly ideal, given that so many other people were suffering,” he was able to immerse himself in the book, writing “seven days a week, sometimes 12, 14 hours a day. It was kind of writerly bliss.”
The result is a novel that follows Roland Baines through the seven decades of his life, frequently jumping back and forth in time as he reflects on how the decisions he made—and the decisions that were made for him—intersected with major world events and completely altered his life’s trajectory. Lessons opens with Roland remembering his first childhood piano lesson with Miriam Cornell while simultaneously coming to terms with the fact that his wife, Alissa, has left him and their infant son in the middle of the night to become a novelist, setting in motion years of uncertainty and regret.
This isn’t the first of McEwan’s novels to include a writer as a character, allowing him to interrogate the relationship between reader, author, and character (see: his internationally bestselling 2001 novel Atonement, and 2012’s Sweet Tooth), but it’s also not his first novel to consider deeply complex human experiences. Amsterdam, for which McEwan won the 1998 Booker Prize, attempts to understand the ethics of art, privacy, and euthanasia. Likewise, 2014’s The Children Act wades into the tenuous relationship between religious beliefs, the well-being of children, and the role of the state.
Unlike McEwan’s other books, which each focus on one of pulls together many of those larger topics as Roland encounters them throughout the entirety of his life. Readers get to see how he changes as the world changes around him. This approach also allowed McEwan to consider a recent topic of interest to him: that of chance. “Who we are, what we are hangs on so much randomness,” McEwan said. We began our conversation by exploring that idea further.