Ian McEwan: Okay Boomer!

Given that Ian McEwan is my favorite novelist, I usually want to extend the reading experience once I’m finished with a quick look at the big paper reviews. With Lessons published this past Fall, as usual the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Guardian gave the latest McEwan novel a lot of attention. I think my favorite is Beejay Silcox essay in The Guardian, subtitled, “Life and times epic of a feckless boomer.” Even so, I found that none of these picked up on what I think is most important about this work – McEwan’s devastating challenge to his own generation (and mine) on climate change.

The ostensible theme of this book is the damage wrought by childhood sexual abuse – “You will be mine forever,” says the piano teacher and lover of the young Roland Baines, and McEwan finds myriad ways to show that this is borne out. Baines is too distracted to finish High School, fritters away some of his potential in a “lost decade” of travel and is soon abandoned by his German wife. She accuses him of “restlessness” and tells her mother that the man is too broken to amount to anything. He constantly fails in his resolve to others, to right the scales of justice when given the chance, to make the most of his talents, or even to be loyal to those who love him, among other failings. “The affair had remained coiled snugly below action, like a snake in deep shade on a hot day.” writes McEwan. We get hints that many of the other characters in the book had had youthful sexual experiences that became a bitter memory or a life-long distraction, but they had responded with more agency or more intentional forgetting.

The personality of Baines has specific experiences but such general characteristics being a polymath who enjoys family and friends, that many readers will relate to him. Like many of his generation he spent a good part of his young years on travel and exploration. Although some of Baines friends are rising in the ranks of an organization, Baines is figuring out how to get past Checkpoint Charlie and other minor adventures. “So it had been worthwhile to be carefree, live hand to mouth and not be like anyone else…he knew it was himself he needed to convince.” Vocationally, he is the least specialized of any McEwan protagonist that I can recall. He presumably had the talent to be a concert pianist, tennis pros and professional magazine writer. The skills set of this character is almost implausibly varied but he drifts in his work and does not find deep fulfilment, a state common enough for a non-McEwan character or a reader of McEwan’s books but not common for a McEwan protagonist. Baines doesn’t see the next trouble until it hits him, and I reckon that readers will tend to get frustrated with this character, squirm with similar recollections of lost opportunities, his and ours.

McEwan often likes to choose a classic literary work that is in synch with his theme and the short story The Dead from James Joyce’s Dubliners, contributes to Lessons. “She, too, would soon be a shade,” thinks Baines looking at his elderly mother, echoing the line from James Joyce,” One by one, they were all becoming shades.” This novel has more illness and death than any of his previous works and his second wife goes through extreme pain as she dies from cancer. McEwan is genius at setting up a sense of anticipation and foreboding as we wonder whether his main characters will survive until the end. However, in Lessons I don’t think that he wants us to worry that much about Baines who is living a banal old age but I definitely ended the book feeling worried.

I have to ask, however, whether the reviewers got to the end. It is only in the last few pages that McEwan gathers up many loose ends in his narrative and plays these powerfully on the topic of the future. A family gathering in London post Covid quarantine 2021 focuses the reader on the different generations and the impact of their stories. Roland has discovered that his late mother-in law’s journals written in 1946 have found a prestigious publisher. She had daringly visited Germany at wars’ end to investigate the work of the il-fated anti-Hitler group known as the White Rose and there is no doubt that she is a member of the Great Generation. In parallel, Roland’s son Lawrence has found productive work as a computational climate change modeler. He is employed at PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research), the same outfit where McEwan had found a mentor when researching his novel, Solar. We learn nothing about Lawrence’s work because McEwan bends over backwards not to risk boring his readers but after some years of odd jobs like his father Roland, the young man has persisted to gain the expertise to write journal articles. Lawrence’s best friend, and Roland’s stepson Gerald, has become a surgeon. These young men and their peers seem to be sorted.

And Roland Baines and his writing? What of that? Beginning in mid-life he had kept journals about his activities and observations, and in quarantine, Roland had sat down to review the 40 notebooks. He concluded that they were “boring, no insight, passive,” and fearing that family members would read the dull pages, “…he sat close in long overcoat and wooly hat and, with a mug of tea in one hand, fed the poorly rendered second half of his life to the flames, one volume at a time.” He does decide to keep many of his photos and labels them carefully. They are apparently all snapshots of people with the exception of what appears to be an unassuming puddle in western Canada, a small detail that brings the fear and suspense up a notch. We learn that this small pool of water harbors hundreds of tadpoles unaware that their habitat will soon disappear through evaporation, a fresh take on the boiling frog metaphor that entered climate change discourse in its early days.

In an extended conversation with himself in Covid isolation, Baines relates that the book that he most wants to read is a history of the 21st century. “If, by some stroke of epiphenomenal luck, he could get his hands on the phantom book…” Recalling an age-old baby boom anxiety he asks among other questions. “Could we manage the century without an exchange of nuclear missiles?” But then he concludes his rather long list with an apt metaphor recalling the title of his wonderful, earlier novel Nutshell. “But each of these problems was parochial, local to a mere human timescale. They shrank and tightened into a bitter kernel contained within the shell of the greater matter, the earth’s heating…”

The unfinished history is still on Baines’ mind when he is finally seated next to his beloved granddaughter post-quarantine. “Well, there’s a pretend book I want to read. It’s very interesting and so enormous that I don’t think I’ll ever get to read it at all.” But he regrets having brought the topic up. “It was not a children’s book. He loved her and in the liberated moment he thought that he hadn’t learned a thing in life and never would….Yes, a mistake to mention such a book when he was passing on to her a damaged world.” And so ends this rambling but ultimately profound book as Baines is helped across the room by someone who will have to lead the way – a kind and intelligent child.