![]() It is an ambitious ploy aimed at revealing how one life, despite its particularities and uniqueness, can embody and reflect the changing history of the world. He mines current affairsthe here and now, the rearview mirror, and the just-over-the-horizonsteering readers through crises. ![]() A writer’s writer par excellence, Ian McEwan has long been lauded for his fearless imagination and exquisitely calibrated sentences. Running alongside this story are the echoes of world historical events that impinge directly or indirectly on Roland’s life: the Chernobyl disaster the birth of the word processor the fall of the Berlin Wall the collapse of the Soviet Union Tony Blair and New Labour breaking the stranglehold of the Conservatives in Britain. A fiction master explores the effects of childhood trauma amid global turmoil. As Roland tries to come to terms with this catastrophe, we are given - looping back and forth in time - an account of Roland’s life: his childhood in Tripoli his boarding school days in the English countryside his itinerant existence in London his marriage and its breakup fatherhood, and his relationship with his parents, particularly his long-suffering mother. On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister. His wife has abandoned him and his infant son, leaving only a note behind. Ian McEwan’s symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose. ![]() ![]() As Lessons opens, we find Roland, who has just become a father, in a state of dismay and dizzying bewilderment. ![]()
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