We can, though, revel still in his prose, and should not forget that this is the gift which has secured his success. But if we learn nothing, it cannot be enough simply to revel in a portrait of an unspectacular life, however well described. McEwan’s lack of didacticism, apart from in his rather tedious diversions to contemporary politics, is mostly welcome. At the end, we are told that there are no takeaway life hacks, no easily understood solutions from what we have read – it would be a “shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson”. The violent possibilities of childhood memory are not so stark, or convincing. Yet the sheer weight of the narrative, the multiple highlights of a whole life, mean this one event does not take a hold on the story as in McEwan’s most renowned passages. Lessons by Ian McEwan is out on September 13 (Vintage, £20) Sent off to boarding school, Roland’s youth is prematurely ended by the attentions of his piano teacher. Roland, with whom the narrator maintains a distance while sharing a lens, grows up with an unsettled family in Libya: a mother and father forced into perpetual silence over a family secret. Truth and fiction from the author’s life are woven into a satisfyingly autobiographical tale which would seem contrived enough without us knowing. Lessons seems a suitable title, then, for what could be read as McEwan’s farewell novel. Few can describe better what it felt like to have seen the history of the last half-century unfolding around them. Nevertheless, his novels do speak of a world easily recognisable and yet unerringly disturbing: the English gardens and war tragedies of Atonement, the political turmoil in Black Dogs, the hauntingly silent, fork-rattling tragedy of On Chesil Beach.
Some call it manipulation, others see it as skilful suspense. Mixed with a solid grasp of history and his characters’ places within its tumult, this psychological acuity is his main appeal.
He is the master of the half-surprise, the nightmarish possibilities of the seemingly common character. Discomfited is the best word to describe Ian McEwan’s fictional world.
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