Years of doldrum

John Updike said of his most enduring creation, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, that he was a version of the author who never went to college. Roland Baine, protagonist of Lessons, is something similar: a McEwan that failed. He’s a man whose early gifts aren’t brought to fruition. His closest brush with literary fame is brief: early marriage to a woman who becomes the kind of artist he could never be. Roland does not possess the requisite ruthless ambition; he lacks the splinter of ice in the heart. He’s a sensualist by inclination and passive by nature – a born helpmeet and second stringer who cobbles together a working life as a lounge-bar pianist and part-time tennis instructor.

That Roland is an apparent declination from his eminent creator is the first virtue of McEwan’s new novel, his longest and most formally ambitious since Atonement (2001). Too often, especially in recent years, McEwan’s works have been stocked with grand figures – scientists of genius, brain surgeons, standard issue éminences grises. But such men of mark (and they were primarily men) were too proximate to McEwan’s own high standing in Anglosphere Letters. They felt like self-aggrandisement by proxy.