Like his inventor, Roland Baines is raised by a working-class soldier and his somewhat intimidated wife spends his early years on an army base in northern Africa (where McEwan’s father was stationed, and where the writer spent his early youth) is later shipped off to boarding school in England (McEwan attended Woolverstone Hall in Suffolk) witnesses the global optimism that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the descent into authoritarianism and pessimism that has followed and even has a secret brother, whose existence he discovers only decades later. “Roland’s almost like a kind of alter ego,” McEwan admits, “a life that I might have had,” had McEwan been immensely less successful.

(Echoes of his brutal custody battle for his two sons with his first wife, the astrologer and alternative healer Penny Allen, turn up in at least three.) Lessons is no exception. McEwan has always mined his life for details in his novels. Lessons is a departure for the generally serious and always disciplined stylist: a shaggier, more discursive, at times even quasi-autobiographical cradle-to-(almost)-grave accounting of the complete life of Roland Baines, a typical (but this being McEwan, not typical at all) British baby boomer whose life is both privileged and not. The 74-year-old writer’s work is famously focused (he has spun entire books from an eventful Saturday morning, out of the consequences of a single spiteful lie). The literary product of McEwan’s long lockdown is Lessons, his latest and (at nearly 500 pages) by far his longest novel. McAfee has finally tested negative on this morning of my conversation with McEwan, who still has it. McEwan and his wife, former Guardian journalist Annalena McAfee, are still recovering from a bitter bout of COVID, their first, recently contracted on holiday in northwest Scotland. This flow of articulation – he’s the watchful sort who speaks carefully in full sentences off the top of his head – is then interrupted by an explosion of coughing and nose-blowing.

Lessons book by ian mcewan