Lessons

The events and drama of Lessons unfold over a large swathe of 20th- and 21st-century history. Roland is born in 1948, and McEwan describes historical events that affect Roland right through to 2022. These include the Suez Canal crisis in 1956 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, as well as the War on Terror, following the September 11 attacks in 2001, and the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown in 2020. Meanwhile, references are made to events even further back informing Roland’s life. For example, McEwan describes the impact of World War II on Roland’s parents, as well as how his stepmother visits the ruins of immediate post-war Germany and the White Rose group she investigates.

While the range of historical reference in Lessons is broad, the main focal point of the novel, from a philosophical and historical viewpoint, is the end of the Cold War and the implications of this.

The Cold War was a period of hostility between the two rival superpowers that emerged after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union. Never escalating into direct, open warfare between the superpowers, the Cold War was instead fought via a series of proxy conflicts where both superpowers armed or supported different sides in regional conflicts. It was also an ideological and cultural war between the differing economic and political systems of capitalism and communism. In the novel, which begins in 1986, the Soviet Union is already losing this conflict. This is seen by the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, which forces Roland to seal his windows out of fear and which indicates Soviet technological and industrial weakness. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall precipitates the collapse of the Soviet Union, which formally dissolved in 1991.

The fall of the Berlin Wall plays a central role in Lessons, with Roland visiting Berlin shortly after the wall’s fall and meeting Alissa there. Roland’s relationships with both Cornell and Alissa had also been linked to Cold War events. In the former case it was the Cuban Missile Crisis that pushed Roland toward Cornell, and in the latter the Stasi’s arrest and release of Roland’s East German friends brought him together with Alissa. As such the end of the Cold War has a symbolic resonance for Roland. It suggests a time when previous alignments and ideas might be overcome and new hope might emerge.

At a global level, though, the initial optimism of this period is soon replaced with uncertainty and pessimism. Roland’s sense that he has got beyond the trauma of his earlier relationships, just like the sense that the world is “moving forward” after the Cold War, gradually starts to become more questionable. The ghosts of the past, he finds, are not so easily overcome, and new problems, such as nationalism and terrorism, soon arise to replace the old.