A boy, just 14, attends a piano lesson at the boarding school in rural Suffolk, near the North Sea, to which he’s been dispatched from London, ripped away from mother and father and two older half-siblings, who live elsewhere but not all that far away. The piano teacher, in her mid-20s, draws close, closer than she should. The event changes his life.
That lesson is the starting point of Ian McEwan’s 2022 novel, Lessons, plural. There are many to come. But how do we make sense of World War Two, the invasion of Iraq in early years of the twenty-first century, the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, San Francisco in the hippie years, a would-be novelist who becomes Germany’s most highly regarded writer who has abandoned her newborn son and husband and fled from England? How do we make sense of the effortless and yet illogical punctuations of time and the abrupt but somehow smooth changes in location, as if Einstein’s spacetime itself could be held in a glance across the novel’s four hundred, eighty-six pages, and in each of its paragraphs?
More than a few times, Ian McEwan has been counted among that oft-despised category of novelists “of ideas” (Garner, 1998; LeMahieu, 2019; Seaboyer, 2005). He makes little secret of his interest in philosophy, in the role of fiction as an ethical form, his interest in metaphysics, or at least what used to count as metaphysics came to be subsumed into the new physics of uncertainty, complexity, and entanglement. Writing on McEwan’s work as a whole, and before this novel, Dominic Head (2019, p. 1) says, “McEwan is at the forefront of a group of novelists who reinvigorated the ethical function of the novel,” and he does so “in ways that embody a deep response to the historical pressures of the time.”
Yet reading this novel, you don’t need to worry about any of that. It’s just the sub- and superstructure, the ontological base and pelmet through which plot – with its loops through space and time – takes place and lets us puzzle – along with its protagonist – about any would-be significance beyond the pathos of the story, or the nature of pathos itself. No doubt some critics will try to point at this or that understanding. To do so, I think, is to miss the point, if there is a such a thing as a “point” in the four dimensions of spacetime frozen and immutable that humans can understand not by the senses but only by mathematics.
Or perhaps by music. The seminal lesson in Lessons is of music.
Three-quarters of the way through reading this novel, I came across an essay in the New York Times, by the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. He wrote:
Music, if you study it properly, is a lesson for life. There is much we can learn from Beethoven, who was, of course, one of the strongest personalities in the history of music. He is the master of bringing emotion and intellect together. With Beethoven, you must be able to structure your feelings and feel the structure emotionally — a fantastic lesson for life! When we are in love, we lose all sense of discipline. Music doesn’t allow for that.
But music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments …
He wasn’t commenting on McEwan, on Lessons, or on the piano lessons of the protagonist and all that happens in its wake and before. But he might have been.
I won’t try to summarize this novel’s content, its characters, their relations to each other, the places involved. That would take time and space out of sync with each other. I won’t either about the issues discussed that might lead someone to call this a “novel of ideas” or a fiction of philosophical intent. I’ve written on this in these pages before, and in academic papers (Nordberg, 2023, 2024). Doing so – with this work – would involve trying to describe a content that demands to be seen in the round, not in a line of inquiry.
Nor will I deconstruct the craft that builds the experience I had while reading it. I might try to do so, privately, but not here or now. I’d like to know the technique that let McEwan pull this off this philosophical, political, psychological, and social flight of imagination. Maybe I could unlock the secret of building something resembling this indistinction between reason and emotion, between cognition and affect, this meaning with words that I cannot put into words.
Dewey (1934/1958) wrote that the audience – the viewer, the reader – of a work of art is a creator too, but not just as the artist, indeed, differently from the artist. In fiction, reading is a creation of meaning from the seeds of story. McEwan has offered his readers a lesson by planting seeds of ideas, some of which have sprouted, others that we’ll (I’ll) continue to watch grow. Others lie in fallow ground. But they may yet germinate, as spacetime permits.
Dewey, J. (1934/1958). Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn.
Garner, D. (1998, 1 April). The Salon Interview - Ian McEwan. Salon.com. Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/test2/1998/03/31/cov_si_31int/
Head, D. (2019). Introduction. In D. Head (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan (pp. 1-13). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LeMahieu, M. (2019). The Novel of Ideas [2019]. In D. Head (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan (pp. 60-74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nordberg, D. (2023). Enactment or exploration: Two roles for philosophy in the novel of ideas. Philosophy and Literature, 47(1), 108-127. doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2023.a899681
Nordberg, D. (2024). Enacting and exploring ideas in fiction: The Overstory and The Portable Veblen. New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 21(1), 73-93. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2023.2222098
Seaboyer, J. (2005). Ian McEwan: Contemporary Realism and the Novel of Ideas. In J. Acheson & S. C. E. Ross (Eds.), The Contemporary British Novel (pp. 23-34). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Don, this book has been sitting on my desk for several years now, unopened, due mainly to work distractions, especially a new novel of my own. But I'm a great admirer of McEwan, and his subtle and compassionate, humanistic stories. So, thanks for the reminder. It sounds marvelous.