Lessons

“She sits close on the piano stool. Perfume, blouse, red nails. Vivid as ever, as though dirt of the grave in her hair.”

These are lines from the poem Roland had written about his relationship with Cornell. The reference to the grave attracts the attention of the police inspector, who suspects Roland may have murdered Alissa. However, what the poem really shows is how Roland, decades after breaking up with Cornell, is still haunted by her memory. Specifically, he is haunted by the memory of the piano lessons he had with her when 11, and how this warped his emotional and erotic life afterward.

“Roland, who knew something of these war-like preparations, got into his mother’s bed at night not only to receive comfort but to give it.”

Roland describes how he used to sleep in his mother’s bed up until the age of 11, when his father went away on maneuvers with the military. Roland not only needed friendship and comfort; his mother, due to Robert being emotionally neglectful, needed it as well. Robert’s decision to send Roland away to England was not just about correcting Roland’s excessive desire for intimacy but also about attempting to correct his wife’s desire for intimacy as well. In this sense, Robert’s exertion of control over his wife parallels Cornell’s over Roland.

“When he repeatedly failed at an exercise and risked saying he could not do it, she told him he was a useless little girl.”

In Roland’s first few lessons with Cornell, she subjects Roland to threats and humiliation. She also threatens to dress him in a pink frock belonging to her niece. Ostensibly, such humiliation is intended to make Roland practice harder and avoid mistakes. In practice, though, such threats are designed to put Roland under her control, and to normalize the idea that she can do as she wishes with his appearance and body.

“[…] how easily it could have been Heinrich led to the guillotine.”

When Jane meets her future husband, Heinrich, in Munich, she makes an immediate association between him and the White Rose students who were executed by the Nazis. This association, aided by the fact that Heinrich had known one of the lawyers who attended the White Rose trial, makes her fall in love with him. However, this fantasy, of Heinrich as someone who could have sacrificed himself, is more a projection of what Jane wants to believe than a true reflection of Heinrich, who is a rather ordinary individual.

“Even so her regret lingered through a lifetime.”

Shortly after meeting Heinrich, Jane had fallen in love and had been sincerely happy with the idea of marriage to him. However, she gave up her literary aspirations to have a family, and the sense of lost possibility over her writing haunted her life. This regret was only deepened by the realization over the years that Heinrich was not a romantic, radical figure, but a conventional and slightly dull small-town lawyer.

“As he lay waiting for sleep he remembered his friend’s question: what if you died before you had it?”

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Roland and his school friends contemplate the possibility that the world might end, and that they would die without having had sex. Fear of this leads the 14-year-old Roland, who had avoided Cornell for three years, to cycle to her house. With this incident McEwan explores The Intertwining of History with Personal Narratives, suggesting how events of global significance can have dramatic, but indirect, effects on the personal lives of individuals.

“He had already been told that while she ironed his clothes he would be washing the dishes.”

After Roland visits Cornell and they have sex, she makes him perform a number of household chores. This shows Cornell yet again using sex and the promise of sex as a means to control and manipulate Roland into doing what she wants. On another level, this scene is also a comment on the way passion and romance quickly becomes domesticated.

“Something reptilian, single-minded and greedy, had been aroused in him. If he had been told he was pathologically addicted to sex as others were to drugs, he would have owned up gaily.”

Roland reflects on his 20s and his inability to settle down or commit to one woman. Roland sees this as a result of his relationship with Cornell as a teenager. He had been spoilt by easy, joyful, and abundant sex with her and now, like a drug addict trying to rediscover that first high, is constantly looking to reclaim it.

“In our household there were no beliefs, no principles, there were no ideas that were valued. Because my father had none. Army drill and standing orders, regulations instead of morals.”

Roland tells Alissa about Cornell. Roland blames his father, and his prioritization of arbitrary military rules over genuine values, for his inability to see that Cornell’s behavior was wrong. Roland sees this conversation as signifying a new level of intimacy between himself and Alissa. However, he fails to mention or address his own complicity in what had happened with Cornell, and the joy he had taken from their relationship.

“She too deceived herself in marriage.”

On visiting Alissa’s parents after breaking up with Alissa, Roland hears Jane talk about the argument she had with her daughter. Alissa said that she had left Roland and Lawrence because she did not want to become embittered with life, like her mother, who had been disappointed with the man she had married. Alissa suggests that, like Heinrich with Jane, Roland had “deceived” her by playing the role of the radical bohemian, while he was in fact simply someone who could not commit to anything.

“I’ll tell you your story. You wanted to be in love, you wanted to be married, you wanted a baby, and it all came your way. Then you wanted something else.”

After a chance meeting in a café in Berlin in 1989, Roland confronts Alissa. Alissa claims that she had left him to pursue the higher calling of being a novelist, which, she says, was impossible in the confines of family life with Roland. Roland argues, as Jane had also, that Alissa is rationalizing her own egocentrism and selfishness. Having acquired the ordinary goals of love, marriage, and children she became bored and wanted the greater ego validation that came with being a famous writer.

“[…] he knew very well that they were indulging in a sexy game with his stuff locked away and he loved her for it.”

When 15-year-old Roland goes to live with Cornell a few weeks before the start of the new school term, she locks his clothes and possessions in her shed and makes him wait for her in her house in his pajamas. Roland interprets this in an entirely innocent way, as a harmless and consensual erotic “game.” However, for Cornell, locking away his clothes is a way of exercising further control over Roland and testing what he is willing to do for her.

“The kitchen wall clock stopped along with his existence. He hovered over it, his life, supine on the sofa, with nothing left for him but to long for her.”

Stuck in Cornell’s house during the day while she is working, Roland finds himself with little to do and becoming very bored. As such, all his attention and energy is focused on Cornell’s return. Even time itself becomes organized around her disappearance and arrival. McEwan uses a metaphor, comparing something to something else without the use of “like” or “as,” in this case comparing Roland’s waiting with the stopping of the clock and therefore time.

This situation is, of course, deliberately orchestrated by Cornell. She wants Roland’s whole life to revolve around her and for him to have no life, interests, or thoughts besides her.

“They were busy, house prices were rising unevenly across the postal districts, and it was less perilous somehow to have two places barely a mile apart.”

Since 1995, Roland had been planning to marry his longtime friend Daphne. Two years later, though, they are still not married. Roland attributes this to external factors such as work and house prices. However, the real reason is that he’s not excited by Daphne and the prospect of a pragmatic and socially acceptable marriage. This is due to the lingering effects of his sadomasochist and illicit relationship with Cornell.

“You think I’m rude. No, I’m being firm.”

When the 16-year-old Lawrence travels around Europe, he finds Alissa’s address from her agent, Rudiger, and visits her. In one view, Alissa’s dismissal of him, and her assertion that she does not want to see him again, is unnecessary and cruel. However, her dismissal may be psychologically necessary for her to avoid confronting the moral consequences of her desertion.

“So you can ‘move on.’”

When Roland goes to see Cornell in 2001, after a visit from a police inspector investigating historic sex abuse cases, Cornell is dismissive of him. She mocks Roland’s desire for an explanation or apology and is indifferent to the effects that her actions may have had on Roland’s life. However, beneath the veneer of cruelty, Cornell’s comments also give voice to a sense, important for McEwan, that traditional ideals of closure are problematic or impossible. The past necessarily defines us, he suggests, even if that past is unpleasant or unpalatable, and even if there is no straightforward way to simply move beyond it.

“He was the cocky little sprat who came looking for instant sexual initiation for fear that the world was about to end.”

After hearing Cornell’s explanation for why she abused Roland, Roland is confused and wonders about his own culpability. In one sense, it is true that he had made the choice to go and see Cornell and had done so in order to experience easy sex. However, Roland also recognizes that Cornell may be manipulating, and may have manipulated, him to blame himself for what she did. In the end, Roland is unable to decide between these contradictory interpretations and remains in a state of moral confusion.

“The sight of his mother’s pureed lunch in a plastic bowl had made Roland feel nauseous.”

In 2005, Roland visits his elderly mother, who now has dementia and is in a home. Ostensibly Roland is disgusted by the unappealing sight of her pureed food. On a deeper level, Roland’s nausea reflects a horror at the prospect of old age, illness, and death, which he now realizes is also slowly creeping up on him.

“Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago.”

After Daphne’s husband left her for the second time, Roland, in his 60s, proposes to Daphne, and she accepts. This leads Roland to reflect that the key to happiness is to act without excessive deliberation. In contrast, much of Roland’s past life had been spent overthinking decisions and ruminating on the past.

“Let’s get it over with. I’ve booked a table for lunch at Askham Hall.”

Seven years after Daphne’s death, Roland goes to a place in the Lake District to scatter her ashes. However, Peter, her ex-partner, whom Daphne had forbidden from participating in this, shows up as Roland is about to perform the rite. On one hand, this shows Peter’s callousness, and his willingness to use force to get his own way. On a deeper level, Peter’s remarks, and the scene in general, are a comment on the arbitrariness of rites of closure.

“Have I really got to give you a lesson in how to read a book?”

Alissa scoffs at Roland’s suggestion that he resembles the abusive husband in her novel and at Roland’s egotistical reading of the text. McEwan is here commenting on the problematic nature of fictional biography and on the blurred lines between real characters and fictional ones inspired by real characters.

“Where he simply listed experiences, mother and daughter gave them life.”

Toward the end of his life, in his 70s, Roland looks back on the journals he had been keeping in the preceding decades. He compares his own journals unfavorably to Jane’s, and to Alissa’s novels. Deciding to burn his journals, he realizes that it is not enough to merely document experiences; rather there must be some imagination and art involved in the writing process that fashions experiences into meaningful stories. Here McEwan is commenting on the artistic and philosophical limitations of biography as a genre, and Writing as a Means to Reveal and Conceal Truth.

“By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol? […] walls were going up. So many lessons unlearned.”

After burning his journals, Roland reflects on the historical and political changes that have occurred since he started writing them. Specifically, Roland reflects on how the optimism that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the sense that tolerance and freedom would continue to spread, has dissipated. This is symbolized for Roland by the 2021 attack of the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump. In the place of tolerance and freedom, Roland suggests, we have been entering a new era of nationalism and restriction, symbolized by the erection of new walls around the world.