By analogy, youth persists in a state of potentiality you can be a scientist or a firefighter, or, in the case of Roland Baines, a concert pianist or a tennis pro. The problem only resolves itself into an either/or proposition when we bring the state of potentiality to an end by looking inside the box. Is the cat in the box dead? Or is it not dead? As long as it remains in a state of potentiality, so Schrödinger tells us, then we can safely presume that it is both dead and not dead. While not of a particularly scientific cast of mind, Baines has over the years read the occasional book by popularizers of quantum physics and cosmology and finds in the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat a useful way of thinking about how his life has played out. The lesson is that about some things it is better not to change your mind.In this, Ian McEwan’s umpteenth novel, we trace the life of Roland Baines, exact contemporary of Ian McEwan himself. This is a curious novel and one of the oddest things about reading it is seeing McEwan abandon the qualities – brevity, subtlety, strangeness – that made his great works resonant, in favour of slack writing, didacticism and received wisdom. “Freedom of expression was in retreat and digital public spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses…” thinks Roland, echoing views McEwan has expressed in articles and interviews. Instead, McEwan interrupts with unnecessary historical context (“In the new year, 2021, in a post-solstice eclipse, the third lockdown began, the US president was replaced amid turmoil and at midnight on 31 January Europe was left behind…”) and jibes about Brexit, Christianity, Islam and trans rights.

But Roland’s story would have been more affecting had McEwan stuck to telling it and let history take care of itself. Roland wisely reflects: “In surveying a life it was inadvisable to acknowledge too much defeat” and it is in these kinds of observations that the novel is at its strongest. The final part is full of death and decrepitude and, while McEwan writes convincingly about the body’s deterioration (“Falling, in showers, out of bathtubs, on pavements, over carpet edges, off buses, down slopes was how many among the old started to die”), narrative drive is the real casualty. His Booker Prize winning Amsterdam (1998) and his celebrated Atonement (2001) were distinguished by, among other things, his unshowy prose style.īy contrast, Lessons feels self-indulgent and under-edited and, as it goes on, the problems mount. Reading Lessons, I tried to suppress the suspicion that McEwan had written a long novel simply to show that he had the stamina.

Roland baines