In McEwan’s 2005 novel “ Saturday,” literature reveals its charms to soothe the savage breast when a thuggish home invader is pacified by the recitation of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” However, presented from Roland’s limited third-person perspective, “Lessons” lacks the same authority wielded by either the novelist in “Atonement” or the reciter in “Saturday.” Confined to each day’s vantage point, the diaries that Roland keeps and later burns offer few lessons. In the final section of McEwan’s 2001 work “ Atonement,” 77-year-old Bryony Tallis, a successful novelist, reveals herself to have been the novel’s narrator, and to have presented her version of events as atonement for the harm she caused. But, accurate or not, it is the writer who usually gets the last word. Roland admires Alissa’s writings, though when her fictional protagonist flees an abusive husband, he is concerned that readers might erroneously take him for a wife-beater. She had proclaimed “that her ambition was to be the greatest novelist of her generation.” Liberated from domestic responsibilities, she is able to fulfill that dream. Alissa despises her own mother as a failure, a promising young writer who, after marrying Heinrich Eberhardt, an associate of the audacious White Rose, a clandestine clique dedicated to overthrowing the Nazi régime, settles with him for “a safe life and a dull marriage.” Absconding to Germany, where she grew up, Alissa refuses any contact with her husband or son. “I know mthrhd would have sunk me,” she scrawls. In the note she leaves behind, Alissa, who has recently given birth to their son, Lawrence, explains that she felt suffocated by the demands of family life. The year is 1986, and, as anxiety radiates throughout Europe over fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear accident, Roland’s wife is missing. Memory yields to awareness of present circumstances.

From the time he is 14 until he is 16, she will use him as her sex toy.

As Roland struggles with the complexities of Bach, Miriam Cornell, his stern but seductive music teacher, pinches the boy near his crotch, leaving ambiguous sensations that resonate across the years. Eleven-year-old Roland Baines sits at the keyboard in an Ipswich boarding school where his father, a captain in the British army posted in Libya, has deposited him. Ian McEwan begins “ Lessons,” his 17th published novel, with the “insomniac memory” of a piano lesson.

Lessons by ian mcewan review