Ia McEwan has the best of excuses. More than seven hundred pages, which could also indicate a slowdown in the narrative discipline, a loquacity. But not here. Because “Lektionen”, “Lessons” in the original, which is more intelligent (because piano lessons are called this), this novel by the virtuoso British storyteller, who follows a weak satire on Brexit because he is too angry, and who, with dark stories about the end of childhood and achieved world fame through the paradoxes of human relationships (attraction and repulsion, guilt and forgiveness), “Lessons” fits into this series and yet wants more: namely to capture a full life on the earth, a life in its time, including all deviations, intuitions and unlived possibilities, and moreover a life that in its broad lines corresponds to that of the author.
At first glance he is nobody, the protagonist Roland Baines, like the son of a Scottish major, grew up in Libya and was then sent to an English boarding school near Ipswich. The story of McEwan’s belatedly met brother, who came from a relationship between his mother and her future husband, is also included in Roland’s biography. As a bar pianist, this hero carries on his existence in a bubbly, then neoliberal and finally stunted London, as a single parent, as we know him, takes care of his still young son Lawrence. Like everyone else, not just since Hölderlin, he really wanted to be bigger. “But love”, says the ode “CV”, “forces us / all of us down, suffering the curves with more force”: professional tennis player, concert pianist, famous poet, all their dreams blown away.
But whether his intimately damaged life, as he wants it to appear to him in dark times, “undeniably and lamentably unhappy,” is by no means a failure, it is by no means certain, because there are also happy phases. The question of what constitutes a fulfilling life constitutes the philosophical center of the novel. Do they involve humiliation and rejection, lessons in a lifelong learning process that, at best, leads to self-knowledge? Surrounded by a loving family, in retrospect to Elder Roland it almost feels like he should be happy. Yet the hero’s emotional limbo remains, his indolence and his desperate search for himself. In short: Ian McEwan wrote his “Man Without Qualities” in the mid-1970s. His Kakanien is Great Britain, his Agathe (Musil’s forbidden love of life) is the piano teacher Miriam, who is a good ten years older than him.
Lost in the fog of reality
McEwan’s masterful narrative is accompanied by a pervasive fascination with the abyss, whether the children are cementing their dead parents in the garden and incestuously turning to each other (“The Cement Garden”) or, just slightly less macabre, leading a destructive crusade of love against a character (“love madness”). Also this time there is the transgressive, which constitutes the starting point of the narration and the moment of initiation of Roland’s adolescence. During his piano lessons, the talented 14-year-old is seduced (he would have called himself; abused, one might say) by his teacher Miriam Cornell. A sexual bondage developed for a period of two years, which Roland experienced simultaneously with the realization of his wildest dreams. From that moment on, however, music can no longer be his salvation, but instead becomes “his own labyrinth of cold worries”: “He would never find the way out of him”. A perfect picture of Roland’s life aberration; lost in the fog of possibility, he remains in his place.
