“A shaded emptiness, a grey winter sky against which impressions-sounds, sight, touch-burst like fireworks in arcs and cones of primary colour, instantly forgotten, instantly replaced and forgotten again. “No one could know what passed through the mind of a seven-month-old,” McEwan writes. Roland finds inspiration and renewal from his son, a primal poetry, like a pulse.

Lessons is an achievement of language but also of ambition: A male writer charts, in consummate detail, the interior world of a male protagonist barely able to keep his chin above a tide of social change. Onto this narrative through line, McEwan embeds other backstories, including an intriguing riff on Alissa’s idealistic mother. Hers is a defiant declaration of independence: On one card she scribbles “mthrhd would have sunk me,” omitting the vowels in the noun, an erasure of her duty to child and spouse. A radioactive cloud drifts westward just as his wife, Alissa, abruptly abandons the family, her flight mapped out in postcards from across Europe. The novel toggles between Roland’s adolescence and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, when he’s a 38-year-old poet, settled (or so he thinks) in London, and the married father of an infant son. His rich, dense new novel, Lessons, flips the script on “grooming”: In this case, a predatory older woman, Miriam Cornell, initiates a covert, “consensual” sexual relationship with 14-year-old Roland Baines, her piano student, at an English boarding school in 1962.

He dives into moral quandaries at a moment when most authors play it safe, risking “cancellation” from Twitter mobs, willing to boldly go where few writers tread. His characters grapple with unexpected and often murky ethical choices. McEwan has never shied away from explosive topics. As with Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries or Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet series, quotidian lives reflect the sweep and drama of history. His most famous work, Atonement (which was made into a feature film starring Keira Knightley and Saoirse Ronan), plays tricks with readers’ expectations. He mines current affairs-the here and now, the rearview mirror, and the just-over-the-horizon-steering readers through crises from the Blitz to 9/11 to the war in Iraq. A writer’s writer par excellence, Ian McEwan has long been lauded for his fearless imagination and exquisitely calibrated sentences.

Lessons by ian mcewan review