Lessons is, in my opinion, more of a character study than anything else, one seeking to answer various existential questions, chief among them being just how much of our destiny we can actually control. While most bestsellers these days are all about creating massive intrigues and advancing the plot at a steady pace, Ian McEwan shows he is the kind of author willing to walk a more difficult path. I think the first order of business is addressing the sort of book Lessons really is. However, the many questions tormenting him about his own predicament and lot in life might not have simple answers, or at least, not the ones he wants to hear. One day, just as he thinks he is perfectly in control of his life, Alissa mysteriously vanishes, leaving him to care for their young son on his lonesome.Īs various major historical events play out in the backdrop, including the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Roland desperately tries to build a relationship with his son while digging into his own family’s past. He doesn’t let it at act as a deterrent, sneaking his favourite books and records past the checkpoints, eventually marrying the love of his life. Unfortunately for both of them, she lives in East Germany, on the opposite side of the Berlin Wall from Roland. Just when he feels as if he’s doomed to solitude and emotional bankruptcy, he meets Alissa, with whom he finds a second chance at love. Roland is an eleven year-old boy living at a boarding school in the United Kingdom, two thousand miles away from home, under the wing of his piano teacher, Miss Miriam Cornell.Īs Roland quickly grows up, he finds himself irrevocably attracted to Miriam, nine years his senior, and so begins an ill-fated love affair which leaves with him with more scars and blackened memories than anything else. The novel takes us to not long after the end of the Second World War, in the 1960s, a time when the casualties and full extent of the destruction are still fresh in people’s memories.

Though it would seem we are technically free to do as we please, there also appear to be numerous external factors influencing our decisions and guiding our lives, as is the case for Roland Baines in Lessons by Ian McEwan. Whether or not human beings have true free will is a topic which has kept awake our greatest philosophers since time immemorial, and the truth is we still haven’t settled on a definitive answer. Ian McEwan Raises a Question of Free Will

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