The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood, 2015

I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews, I really don’t, and sometimes it’s better to just not review a book that to take it apart. But at the same time I don’t want to self censor. So here goes: The Heart Goes Last is dreadful. It’s a hot mess. I can’t imagine if it had been written by anyone less famous than Atwood it would have been considered for a second by any publisher. That’s not to say it doesn’t have any redeeming features, but you will struggle to find them. It doesn’t make Atwood any less of a writer (well it does a bit) – The Handmaid’s Tale will always be a great book – but The Heart Goes Last is almost from a different author, it’s so casually, carelessly bad.

So what’s wrong with it? It opens promisingly enough. The setting is a very similar world to that described in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the USA of the near future in which the economy has collapsed and social order is breaking down. (Towards the end of the novel this economic collapse is forgotten and we are back to a very recognisable consumer economy. By then the idea of disorder has done its job). Charmaine and Stan are a young under-employed couple living in their car, surviving on Charmaine’s wage and tips from her bar job. Both have been recently lost better paying jobs, and both will eventually find their way back to their previous employers in very different circumstances. They are under threat from the dangerous criminal elements that seem to roam unchecked in the streets. Stan’s brother, Conor, is a small-time criminal who helps him out from time to time. It’s clear that Stan and Charmaine’s way of life won’t last for long – they are getting desperate.

One day Charmaine sees an advertisement for Conscilience, a community in which jobs and housing are available. What’s the catch? Something very similar happens in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, where a family trades their home in their vulnerable walled community for an apartment in a company run town. Butler doesn’t follow this thread of her story through (in the original novel at least – I have yet to read the sequel) but this very similar community becomes the focus for Atwood’s story. In Conscilience (motto – “Do Time Now, Buy Time for Our Future”) everyone spends one month working in the community and alternate months in prison. Yes, I know, that makes no sense at all. Being in prison seems virtually the same as being outside it – in both cases they can’t leave the overall community – and the economic model underpinning the enterprise just doesn’t add up. Of course I understand this is not to be read literally – this is a parable about Americans trading their freedom for economic security, and at the same time a satire on the for-profit prison system in the USA – but even parables need to make some kind of sense don’t they? Inside Conscilience Charmaine and Stan have mundane jobs on their ‘freedom’ months and when they are in prison Stan looks after the chicken farm, and Charmaine dispenses lethal injections to prisoners who have proven troublesome. That’s just one of Conscilience’s dark secrets – it practices widespread murder of the difficult and economically inefficient. The management of the community, a company called Positron, is a Big-Brother-like elite using surveillance cameras across the whole community to monitor the inmates. Other sinister secrets are obviously lurking behind the fake smiles of Positron employees. As someone observes “Once you’ve got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want.” The wholesale murder of prisoners is not something they are particularly keen on getting out, but it is suggested that Positron has stumbled across a new social order for the USA which is better than all the other alternatives, and that a few dead prisoners here and there might be a price worth paying.

It seemed to me as if Atwood lost interest in the novel at around this point. Having established the pieces on the board she wasn’t sure what to do with them. All the major satirical points have been made. So she took the strange decision to write the rest of the novel as a ‘madcap’ sex comedy (and whose heart doesn’t drop at those words?) Charmaine begins a passionate, sordid and erotically adventurous affair with the husband of the couple who live in their apartment on alternate months. When this relationship is discovered Stan is forced to re-enact the affair – literally and physically, but for reasons that are never really made clear – with the alternate wife, sordid sex on video and all. The wife turns out to be a disaffected senior figure within Positron who is working to expose the company’s excesses and crimes, but can’t simply email the dossier of incriminating data to a journalist because – well, just because – so has to come up with an elaborate scheme to smuggle Stan out of Conscilience with a memory stick hidden in his belt. This overly elaborate scheme, which dominates the latter part of the novel, involves sex robots, Elvis and Marilyn impersonators, and a clumsy reference to the Blue Man Group. There’s also a sub-plot involving pioneering surgery which causes the recipient to fall in love with the first person they see when they come around from the anaesthetic, which I assume is a commentary on free-will but by this point I had long lost interest.

You will either read this element of the novel – the sex comedy – as either a Swiftian romp (as one extremely generous reviewer described it) or find it pretty unbearable. Whatever your thoughts on these chaotic chapters, the clash in tone with the realism of the first half of the novel is jarring. There are lots of other problems with this novel. The subject of paedophilia sex-bots is raised and quickly dropped. At one point it is hinted that Positron is planning to sell the blood of babies. Again, mentioned then quickly dropped. The casual homophobia – the Elvis impersonators all pretend to be gay to avoid having to sleep with their escorts when working in this area – was ugly. All of these elements shouldn’t have survived a careful editing of the novel, but I am not sure what would have been left.

Goodreads is normally relentlessly positive about the novels reviewed on the site – I think this is because the people who take the trouble to write reviews are usually ones who have enjoyed the books. But the Goodreads scores for The Heart Goes Last are awful – 23k three star reviews compared to a generous 8k five star.

All authors have misfires, but this one should have stayed in the draft folder.

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, Janice Hallett, 2023

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels is Hallett’s third (substantial) novel to be published in the last two years, following 2021’s The Appeal, and 2022’s The Twyford Code. A fourth novel is already in the works. She is a busy writer!

The distinctive feature of all three novels is their format – they are modern versions of epistolary novels in which the narrative is told not by a narrator but through texts, WhatsApp messages, diary notes and in the case of Alperton a host of other primary sources, including extracts from a screenplay and two novels. This can make the narrative quite fragmented – there is no guiding consciousness to explain what is going on, the reader has to do a lot more of the work – but it is refreshingly different, and allows multiple voices and perspectives to be heard, as well as telling the story in lots of different ways. Together they tell the contemporary story of the eponymous Alperton Angels, a millennial cult that ended in a bloodbath eighteen years earlier. A baby that survived the killings is due to come of age, and Amanda Bailey, a crime writer, is commissioned to write a book about the case. The book is part of a crime series re-examining previous murders, and there are lots of references to real-life cases (Fred West etc). Her editor impresses on her that the key to making the book a success is finding and interviewing the rescued baby. And so it begins.

It quickly becomes apparent that there is more to the ‘mysterious case’ than originally appears. Some basic information about the three – or is it four? – deaths is missing. What appears to be a very well known and researched case melts away on closer examination, and none of the key witnesses can be found or are willing to talk. Alarmingly people Amanda tries to interview start to die off in unexplained circumstances. A fellow crime writer, Oliver Menzies, is also working on the story, and when their investigations overlap their publishers suggest they work together, trying to find fresh perspectives on the case. The novel’s approach to narration means information is slowly eked out and there’s limited reflection by the characters. Amanda’s transcription assistant, Ellie, provides a useful sounding board for her to bounce ideas off, but her relationship with Oliver is constrained by more than professional competitiveness – they have a history dating back to when they first entered the profession.

I had some reservations about Hallett’s earlier novels – yes, they were satisfyingly easy reads in which the pages kept turning quite briskly, but the mystery elements of the stories simply weren’t strong enough. The outcome of the various puzzles often depended on people behaving irrationally and sometimes just didn’t add up. With this novel at first it looked as if using a crime where irrational behaviour was a fundamental part of the case might have resolved some of these issues – if ever a participant did something unbelievable or bizarre it could be written off as symptomatic of the power of the cult. And Amanda seems very professional in her approach to her investigation – she has a sensible and very systematic working pattern which is set out clearly for the reader. She also has extensive contacts in the crime world (police and social services in particular) and is prepared to bend a few rules in the interests of getting the story. Oliver on the other hand is less impressive and acts as a drag on the investigation.

But suspension of disbelief can only get you so far. And so will being spoiler-free. So from this point in this review expect spoilers and stop reading if you haven’t yet read The Mysterious Case and intend to do so.

Firstly, I wasn’t convinced at all that Oliver would become a believer in the arrival on earth of the antichrist on the basis of a fifteen minute interview with the charismatic cult-leader, who we are told is just a common everyday kidnapper. Amanda impersonates a friendly spiritual adviser who leads Oliver further down the path but it’s still a long way before you decide to kill a minor royal on the off-chance they are the daughter of Satan. This was just one of many comically implausible features of the plot. Amanda’s decision to rush down to try and stop him (rather than say just phoning the police) made no sense at all. And while her investigation is presented as being very thorough there are some sources she ignores – the autopsies of the bodies or the transcripts of the trial proceedings for example, where the number of victims would be easily resolved and original witness evidence would be recorded. We are also invited to believe that not only would the police beat to death a suspect who had been seen walking through the front door of the local police station that evening, but they would then opportunistically add the body to the cult suicide crime scene (which incidentally wasn’t a cult crime scene at all, but the assassination of some underworld kidnappers) as a convenient way of disposing of it. That just makes no sense whatsoever – a beaten body looks very different from someone shot and ritualistically disfigured. And if that wasn’t unbelievable enough we are invited to believe that this was all witnessed by an American crime writer, over in the UK for research, who is allowed to watch the body being dumped and arranged at the crime scene and then just waved on his way back to the USA, never to mention what he saw again, despite it being the kind of thing a crime writer might actually, you know, write about. This is all just plain nonsense. Crime novels can have some improbabilities, granted, the untraceable poisons and so on, but this was way too much to ask.

Which is so disappointing, because the central idea here – revisiting a historic crime investigation, finding a new perspective and working out what has happened to the survivors – is great. And there have been suicide cults in the recent past that were led by charismatic charlatans. So the premise could have worked, and the narrative structure could have papered over some of the cracks and improbabilities. But never to this extent, at least not for me. Such a waste.

Collecting Harry Potter

(Apologies – this is not a review.)

£915,334.89. That’s how much is being asked for for a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on the book selling website ABE at the moment. Another signed copy is being offered for £719,169.88. These are asking prices of course and the actual prices paid are likely to be less, but you take the point – early editions of Potter are worth a lot of money! There’s a really handy check list of things to look for in first editions here. I almost always casually check editions of Philosopher’s Stone in second-hand book shops on the million in one chance of finding one of the 500 first editions (300 of which went to schools) – they must be out there somewhere! The thing I always look for first is on the back cover, which on early editions features this rather curious looking fellow. There’s an interesting story about this drawing told by the original illustrator, Thomas Taylor:

“when I was commissioned to produce the cover art for a debut middle grade novel by an unknown author called J. K. Rowling — and yes, I did read it — I was asked to provide “a wizard to decorate the back cover”. So I did. The books are full of magical characters and sorcerers, so it wasn’t difficult to conjure up one of my own. It never even crossed my mind to depict Dumbledore….The publishers found themselves repeatedly called on to explain why the wizard on the back didn’t

correspond to the description of Dumbledore in the book. It was clear what readers wanted and expected, so Bloomsbury contacted me for a portrait of the famous head of Hogwarts, and the original wizard disappeared in a puff of smoke. So that’s the answer. The first wizard wasn’t anyone in particular. Except… …except he was, actually. He was based on none other than my own wonderful, magical father. Yes, my somewhat eccentric, embroidered skullcap-wearing dad is the wizard on the back of Harry Potter. “

This illustration is a good sign that you have found an early edition. So when I came across a hardback edition of Philosopher’s Stone with this chap on the back at the reasonable price of £1.50 I was interested. It had an intact dust jacket as well, which sometimes helps. It was a fifth printing of the 1998 Ted Smart edition, after the novel had won the 1997 Smarties Gold Award. People are asking thousands for this edition on eBay, and a first printing is being offered for over £2000 on HarryPottercollectables.com so you never know – but there are others more realistically priced in the tens of pounds. £1.50 was a good value and I always wanted to own an edition with this pre-Dumbledore illustration, so I’m pretty happy. What true book-lover doesn’t enjoy a good second-hand bookshop find?

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, 2022

The New York Times called Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead ‘a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,”’, concluding that this was ‘either a baffling choice or an ingenious manoeuvre’. That’s the question I am struggling with: why use Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as the outline structure for your novel? Was this in some undefined way a form of ‘cheating’, a tribute to Dickens, or simply a case of an author using the well-established technique of borrowing a structure to provided an outline for the events of the novel?

First I need to overcome the vague sense of unease that using someone else’s plot outline is against the ‘rules’ of novel writing. Of course there are no such rules, and while plagiarism is something else entirely, this is nowhere near that level of imitation. Authors have used the plots from other authors from the year dot – Shakespeare’s plots are virtually all borrowed from earlier (or even contemporaneous) texts, and the practice continues to the present day, Ian McEwan’s Nutshell being a very successful adaptation of Hamlet for example. But while borrowing someone’s plot structure and characters may not be against any rules, the author still needs to have a reason for doing this, some original approach that respects the source text but does something new with it – if not that that’s still just copying! There’s a further complication here in that Copperfield is a very personal novel in which Dickens drew upon elements of his own personal life story. David is Charles in some respects, in the way Demon certainly is not Barbara! So does Demon Copperhead does something new with the material of David Copperfield while respecting the original text? I think it does, although I have some reservations, which I will come to.

“You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”

Kingsolver’s hero and endearingly honest narrator is Damon Fields, known as Demon and nicknamed Copperhead for his red hair. Demon is the living definition of trailer-trash, born to a drug-using teenage single mother in a trailer in Virginia. Lee County is in the heart of the Appalachians, a community of largely white folk who are the butt of all American jokes about rednecks and hillbillies. Wikipedia says this of the stereotyping of Appalachian people:

“Appalachian individuals are perceived largely to be impoverished, white, rural, lazy, and rough around the edges. Appalachians are also stereotyped to be hillbillies. NPR describes the stereotypical portrayal of Appalachians as “children in sepia-toned clothes with dirt-smeared faces. Weathered, sunken-eyed women on trailer steps chain-smoking Camels. Teenagers clad in Carhartt and Mossy Oak loitering outside long-shuttered businesses.” Other common Appalachian stereotypes include inbreeding, poor dental hygiene, and wearing no shoes.”

Kingsolver clearly finds this stereotype offensive and empathises with Damon and his community, but she does little to challenge the oversimplified portrait – the novel is full of people who fit this description! Not everyone is an ill-educated redneck, of course, but there are more than enough. Demon is from a sub-category of this community – he identifies as a Melungeon, a dark-skinned ethnic group specific to this region and descended from Europeans, Native American, and sub-Saharan Africans originally brought to America as indentured servants and slaves. His life is blighted by poverty and discrimination. His early childhood follows the template of the source novel quite closely: an ineffectual mother, a long-dead father and a violent stepfather. When his mother dies of an overdose, he is taken into the ‘care’ of the authorities who do an appalling job of looking after him, putting him into foster homes where he suffers neglect and abuse in equal measure. Finally he tracks down his grandmother who helps him find a home with Coach Winfield and his daughter Agnes. He becomes a successful American football player until he suffers a career ending injury. This injury is the catalyst for the next phase in Demon’s life as he struggling with a crippling opioid addiction. Almost all his peers succumb to the same addiction and several of their lives are destroyed by this new plague. Kingsolver writes powerfully about the impact of this drug and the responsibility of the pharmaceutical companies for engineering the crisis, seeing the issue from the perspective of those involved and affected rather than sitting in judgment from outside the issue:

“What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.“

In most of his novels Dickens championed ideas of social justice and led specific campaigns against child labour, baby farming, money lending and the various other ills that blighted Victorian England. Kingsolver uses the same basic narrative and setting to address more recent social issues in the United States – the appallingly underfunded social care system, the failing education system, racism and of course the opioid epidemic. In this respect the ‘borrowed’ narrative is effective, although it could be argued that a novel about these issues and in this place and time didn’t really needed the overlay of a Dickensian narrative.

I mentioned earlier I had some reservations about the author’s reimagining of the source material. One issue is in the portrait of the modern-day Micawbers, Kingsolver’s McCobbs family. Micawber may be a weak and ineffectual man, but he is also kind-hearted. The McCobbs on the other hand are just plain unpleasant. Steerforth is a much more nuanced character than his Kingsolver equivalent, the sporting bully Fast Forward. There’s also a wider issue with the Dickensian origins of the novel – sometimes it becomes a distraction. I found myself trying to recognise scenes, characters and parallels with the source material rather than focussing on the novel itself. This isn’t a big issue – because I don’t know Copperfield particularly well I was able to just read Copperhead on its own terms, as an American novel about an orphan who struggles to find a safe home in the world.

I am still not sure the Copperfield parallels were entirely necessary. With or without them this is a powerful story about an American underclass that so far as I know has not previously had a champion. The novel ends on a positive note for Demon and his relationship with Agnes, which suggests the author is also positive for the rednecks, hillbillies and trailer trash she vividly humanises, rescuing them from the ignominy of being the butt of the endless incest and poor dental hygiene jokes.

”

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, 1993

Most dystopian fiction is set after the collapse of civilisation. In some instances it is set a long time in the future, where science has helped rebuild society (see Brave New World, for example). Other works imagine a society where social order has broken down and a new world has yet to emerge. Often the collapse of society is envisaged as happening very quickly – a virus breaks out and before you know it people are killing one another over fresh water and food. John Christopher’s 1950’s novel The Death of Grass is an early example of this genre. But occasionally novelists conclude that the disintegration of society is going to take a little bit longer. Parable of the Sower is one such novel.

Parable of the Sower is told by Lauren Olamina, a fifteen-year-old girl living in the greater Los Angeles area in 2024. (Incidentally that’s a similar time gap – just over thirty years between the date of the novel’s publication and its setting – that Orwell used in 1984 – 1949-1984. This gives the novel a sense of immediacy and recognition that a setting centuries in the future would lose.) Lauren’s father is a pastor and is one of the few remaining people in their society with a paid job – he teaches at a nearby college. Her family live in a walled community and the residents go outside its walls only rarely. Outside public order is breaking down, fuelled by poverty, an indifferent privatised police force, ecological collapse and widespread drug abuse, in particular ‘pyro’, which turns users into pyromaniacs. Lauren concludes that the regular attacks on her community will get worse – while they are armed and willing to defend themselves, the desperation and recklessness of those outside the walls means that sooner or later their community will fall. Lauren studies the skills needed to survive in the outside and prepares resources to take with her. She develops a plan to go north where there are jobs and better social conditions, but doesn’t have time to put this plan in place before the inevitable happens and their compound is destroyed.

A further complication is that Lauren has a condition called hyperempathy, caused by a drug her mother took when she was carrying her. She feels other people’s pain (and pleasure) as if it is her own. She keeps this condition as secret as possible, knowing that it will be seen as a weakness and exploited by others, She keeps a journal – this novel – in which she slowly develops the basis of a new religion she calls ‘Earthseed’. Earthseed is a variation of eastern mysticism that is predicated upon the idea that God is Change. What makes it different from other ‘mother nature’ forms of religion is the idea that the eventual future of humans is to explore the stars. This seems a quite redundant idea given the challenges people face in the present and while the last remaining space exploration programmes are being cancelled by the newly elected President. At least for now the country has a elections and a President.

The torture and murder of Lauren’s brother Keith is a clear warning sign that the end is imminent. Keith had run away from home and joined a gang, but this is a wildly dangerous life and he obviously ran out of luck at some point. Months later Lauren’s father goes missing, another unavoidable sign, but still the community trusts that its walls and guns will protect them. It’s no surprise when the narrative jumps forward to the point when the pyro-addicts attack and almost everyone is killed. Lauren escapes with Harry and Zahra, two community members who she didn’t know very well before but who now become her sole surviving ‘family’. They decide to trek north to find work and safety – although while travelling they are extremely vulnerable to marauders and pyromaniacs, they have a handgun and enough money to survive. On the road others join their group, finding strength in numbers. Lauren tells the group about her nascent new religion and her plans to start a community. They head for a property owned by one of their group and despite several attacks by addicts and the many dangers of the road, they finally reach their new home, which they call Acorn. The novel ends at this point, with key members of the group concluding that they have only a slim chance that their new community will survive.

At some points Parable felt in ‘Young Adult’ territory, particularly the empathetic teenage narrator and the vague eco-religious themes. But the violence (including rape and cannibalism) is pretty graphic, and there’s not much in the novel’s marketing to suggest that it was specifically aimed at a young adult audience. (Having said that the front cover’s quote from John Green (obviously a very popular young adult author) recommending that the novel “pairs well with 1984 or the Handmaid’s Tale” feels like a strong hint to readers looking for companion texts to these standard A level novels.) This is probably a case of the publishers covering all possible market bases.

Butler was primarily a science fiction author, but this isn’t really a science fiction novel, despite the setting. It’s an eminently recognisable portrait of the USA facing ecological and social collapse, with a number of interesting ideas in play. Lauren is the sower in this novel and the parable label encourages the reader to interpret the novel metaphorically – despite the hyper-realism of some scenes. The parable of the sower from which the novel draws its title always interested me, because it is often misunderstood. If you are not familiar with the parable itself the Wikipedia article on it is here. It appears in three of the four gospels and includes a careful explanation from Christ – god’s message is the seed, and we are the ground upon which it falls. Whether the seed prospers or not depends on us. So little possibility of ambiguity? And yet the parable is often understood to be a message of acceptance – whether we prosper or wither away is a matter of chance, depending on whether we (the seed) land on rich or barren soil. You can see why people would be encouraged to read the parable that way – accept your fate in life, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate etc.

Parable is an entertaining, highly readable version of the very familiar end of the world story. Lauren is an erudite guide to events even if she sometimes makes silly mistakes. Not having a designated meet-up point if everything goes wrong once is daft, but to do it twice is unforgiveable. She convictions about Earthseed are something we just have to accept rather that it being an logical conclusion drawn from her observations about the world. The final third of the novel is rushed – people join the group quickly and there’s little time to introduce them before the next gunfight. Late in the novel Lauren also finds out that her condition is not as rare as she thought it was – it is hinted that it is being deliberately spread to make modern slavery more easily reintroduced. The author doesn’t do much with the concept of hyperempathy – it’s just a condition Lauren has to put up with. There are other interesting ideas within the narrative – corporate takeovers of coastal communities for instance – which also peter out. But despite these qualifications I enjoyed the novel enough to immediately order the sequel as soon as I finished, which is a pretty good sign!

Lessons by Ian McEwan, 2022

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons, opens with a disturbing scene in which a young boy’s piano lesson suddenly becomes intimate and distressing. When he repeatedly makes the same mistake with his piece, his (female) teacher responds by first pinching him, then turning the gesture into something more ambiguous:

“her fingers found his inside leg, just at the hem of his grey shorts, and pinched him hard. That night there would be a tiny blue bruise. Her touch was cool as her hand moved up under his shorts to where the elastic of his pants met his skin. he scrambled off the stool and stood, flushed.”

At first he doesn’t properly understand what these touches mean, but he quickly comes to appreciate their sexual intent. This confuses him – he both avoids and seeks out further opportunities for intimacy with his teacher, until eventually three years later their relationship becomes sexual. The narrative is told in flashback by Roland several years after the event. The confusion of his feelings of both shame and at the same time the urgency of his sexual feelings is, in so far as I can possibly tell, conveyed well. This moment is to have a significant and lasting impact on Roland’s life. It haunts him, until many years later he is finally able to confront his abuser and come to terms with what happened to him. Instead of him following the academic path set before him by his parents and his boarding school, his life becomes very disjointed: he doesn’t go to university and never settles to a particular career. He moves from job to job – but this is not necessarily a sign of failure: these jobs are individually rewarding, Amongst other roles he plays the piano professionally, (albeit in a hotel lounge rather than on a concert stage) and teaches tennis. There are worse fates.

Another key moment in Roland’s life occurs when his German-born wife, Alissa, leaves him and their baby son to pursue her ambition of becoming “Germany’s greatest writer”. At first he has no idea where she has gone, and the police are suspicious that his responsible for her being missing, but once he receives postcards from her – simply saying sorry – their suspicions dissipate. It takes a very long time, almost a lifetime, but he finally comes to terms with her decision to leave and recognises her reasons for doing so. It would be going to far to say he supports her decision, but he understands her reasoning, and agrees that the work she produces is very worthwhile. He is puzzled and feels a little rejected when he doesn’t appear in her work in a fictional form, and then when he does feature – as an unsupportive aggressive husband he is equally upset.

Roland’s long and eventful life plays out against the backdrop of “momentous global happenings” from the Cuban missile crisis to the fall of the Berlin Wall, from 9/11 to the Covid lockdowns, events that obviously stand out in McEwan’s own personal memory as landmarks in his life. Even the Blair years and the storming of the Capitol get a mention. There’s a gentleness to the whole thing. We come to care about Roland and want to see him settled and happy, but things never quite pan out the way he hopes, and while some critics have found the lack of resolution to the storylines frustrating, for me their incompleteness gave the novel an authenticity. Roland has a good life, blessed by fortune to be born in England after the war, rather than the many different lives lead by others in twentieth century Europe:

“His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”

This isn’t a novel you read to find out what happens but to read about the ‘lessons’ that can be drawn from life’s experiences. At 74 McEwan is obviously in a reflective mood, and while Lessons is not as impactful as some of his other novels it succeeds on its own terms. It’s also, incidentally, beautifully written, which alone was enough to keep the pages turning even when the main plot lines had petered out:

“Wasted time in beautiful places, lingering joyfully just inside the gates of paradise with the world’s colours aflame, always regretting the setting sun and the call home, the Edenic expulsion into the next day and its usual concerns.”

I was fortunate enough to attend an interview with McEwan last year in Norwich. He was being interviewed by Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent. The interview focussed on the process by which Lessons came to be written rather than the wider discussion of his career and novels that to be honest I was hoping for, but I did come away with some signed copies of his works, which made the journey more than worthwhile.