46 pages • 1 hour read
Ian McEwanLessons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: The source text depicts the sexual assault of a minor by an adult.
Roland Baines is a 37-year-old unemployed poet and father living in London in 1986. He recalls an incident between himself and a piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, when he was 11 at boarding school. Roland was playing a difficult piece of music by Bach, the final piece of which he got wrong. As a “punishment,” Miss Cornell pinched the inside of his leg and touched him at the edge of his gray shorts. She then hit Roland on the knee with a ruler. Roland recalls orgasming for the first time when he was 13, thinking about Miss Cornell. Roland is then awoken from these memories by the cry of his young child, Lawrence.
Roland reflects on how his wife, Alissa, has recently disappeared. She had left him a note saying that she loved him but that he should not try and find her, and that she’d “been living the wrong life” (9). Roland gets drunk thinking about his wife and whether he loves her. He also starts recalling another piano lesson he had with Miss Cornell, a week after she had pinched his leg. Roland had played a piece well, and in response Cornell gave him “a soft prolonged kiss” on the mouth that he “neither resisted nor engaged” (12). She then instructed him to visit her home in a nearby village during a half-day holiday.
Roland receives more postcards from his wife from Germany, where her parents live. A week after reporting her disappearance to the police, he receives a visit at home from inspector Douglas Browne. Browne tells Roland that his own wife left him but suspects that Roland is behind Alissa’s disappearance, and that in missing-persons cases the husband has often murdered the wife. Indeed, Browne says that murdering husbands sometimes start to genuinely believe their own stories about their wives “vanishing.”
Baines then takes Roland’s fingerprints from the postcards and a sweater of Alissa’s. Without Roland’s permission Browne also takes a photograph of one of Roland’s poems in a notebook, to check Roland’s handwriting against that on the postcards from Alissa. After the inspector has left, Roland looks again at his photographed poem, which begins, “Glamis hath murdered sleep” (20). The poem is about the lingering effects of Roland’s relationship with Miss Cornell, but it talks about murder and trying to bury old ghosts. It is thus potentially incriminating in light of Browne’s suspicions.
Later that afternoon Roland goes shopping with his son and sees newspaper headlines about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. When he returns home, he finds another postcard from Alissa inside his door.
Chapter 2 Summary
Roland recalls traveling with his parents from Libya, where they had lived since he was seven, to London in 1959, so that they could drop him off at a boarding school in the town of Ipswich. Staying with his half sister, Susan, and his parents in London a few days before heading to his new school, Roland remembers how he had gone out with his father to buy cigarettes. They had seen a crash between a man on a motorbike and a woman in a car on the street. Both were taken away in ambulances, after being helped by Roland’s father. This led Roland to cry at the thought that “everything worked, and was decent and caring and just” (40). Roland had not realized that he would soon be leaving home forever, and that the next seven years for him would be at school.
Roland reflects on his childhood and his parents. His father, Robert, sent Roland away to boarding school in part because he was worried that Roland was getting too close to his mother, Rosalind. He told Roland years later that “children always got in the way of a marriage” (43). Rosalind, who grew up in the English village of Aldershot, had wanted Roland to stay with them in Libya but was in Robert’s thrall. She rationalized the decision by saying that boarding school would allow Roland to enjoy the education she never had. Rosalind had married, and had two children with, her first husband in 1941. He had died at the end of the war, and Rosalind claims she had then met Robert at an army depot near Aldershot in 1945. They married two years later and had Roland another year after. The young family then went to Tripoli in Libya when Roland was seven, so that his father could work in an army tank-repair depot.
Roland thinks about his first few weeks at his new school, after his parents had left him. The discipline imposed on him, and his having to take responsibility for himself, was a huge contrast from the easy and protected life he had enjoyed in Libya.
Roland then discusses his first piano lesson with Miss Cornell, eight months before the incident where she pinched him, when he was in his second week at school. Cornell had told Roland to wash his hands before starting, then humiliated him by pointing out that he had gotten water on his trousers. In their second lesson, a week later, Cornell made inappropriate contact with Roland, brushing his crotch with her hand, while she “tidied him up” (64). She had also threatened to dress him in a pink frock if he failed at an exercise. In spite of her behavior, Roland continued to fantasize about Cornell up to the age of 14, although, he reveals, he had not gone to visit her home the time when she had asked, after she had kissed him.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Content Warning: The source text depicts the sexual assault of a minor by an adult.
This section portrays Miss Cornell’s abuse of Roland when he is 11 and in his first year at boarding school. As both a teacher and an adult, Cornell exploits her position to establish inappropriate erotic contact with him. The nature of that contact is physically and psychologically abusive. For example, Cornell puts her hand on the inside of Roland’s thigh and then “pinche[s] him hard” and strikes him with a ruler for making a mistake (4). Meanwhile, she routinely humiliates him. She suggests that he has wet himself in their first lesson, and, later, threatens to “confiscate his clothes” and make him wear a “frilly pink frock” if he fails to do what is asked of him on the piano (64).
Yet Roland does not acknowledge her behavior as abuse. Decades later, in his 30s, Roland does not look back on these encounters with horror, or see himself as a victim; instead, he recalls the events with fascination, even fondness. He views Miss Cornell as an alluring, beautiful figure. He does not see her actions as coercive, sadistic, or exploitative but as part of a rich and distinctive life experience. This romanticization of their encounters, and their persistent allure, is evidenced most clearly by Roland’s poem about Cornell. As adult Roland writes, she “sits close on the piano stool. Perfume, blouse, red nails. Vivid as ever […] She won’t go away” (24). Through their relationship, McEwan explores The Significance of Lessons and Teaching and how Cornell exploits her role of teacher to establish a coercive dynamic.
One can ask why Roland acquiesces in, and nostalgically affirms, what Cornell did and fails to see how it was problematic. At least part of the answer lies with the nature of Roland’s boarding school at the time. There, the violation of personal privacy and forms of low-level abuse were commonplace. For example, a nurse measures him and examines his testicles without asking permission. Likewise, Roland’s PE teacher repaid weakness with “viciousness, mental and physical” and once “dug his thumbnail deep into Roland’s ear” for failing to sit correctly on the rugby pitch (57). In such a context, Cornell’s actions, and the idea that she would assert nonconsensual control over his body, does not shock Roland.
At the same time, Roland is in an emotionally vulnerable state when starting school. Roland’s attitude toward Cornell is shaped by the fact that he has just been separated from his home and parents. The trauma of this separation, and the loneliness he feels, means that he is open to any kind of emotional connection. This is especially the case given Roland’s previous closeness to his mother. As Roland says, he “slept in her bed when the captain was away on maneuvers” and “still held her hand, even at the age of nine” (42). Roland is desperate to replace this lost parental intimacy. As such, it is easy to see why Roland would have welcomed the attention of an older woman. Cornell “seeded herself into the fine grain not only of his psyche but of his biology” (66). This early attachment makes the adult Roland unaware of the abusive nature of what he experienced.
Roland’s ambivalence toward Cornell isn’t solely in terms of a maternal bond. Cornell may have offered, through eroticism and control, a substitutive intimacy, but, as Roland acknowledges “she was never maternal or affectionate with him” (64). Her appeal to Roland is by no means simply that of a replacement mother, and in many ways she deviates hugely from such a role. Instead, Roland’s persistent obsession with Cornell stems from a more troubling impulse within Roland himself. Perhaps influenced by the violent undercurrent in his parents’ relationship, and his father’s absences, Roland comes to identify love with pain and attachment with separation. This is seen most vividly in Roland’s memory of the road accident. Roland recalls crying at the ambulances that “came quickly out nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain” at a time when he was “about to leave home forever” (39, 40).
For Roland, love must be demonstrated. And this demonstration, as with Cornell’s tuition, must take the form of a painful lesson. It is why Roland finds it so hard to move on from Miss Cornell. Cornell embodies the sense for Roland that love means being disciplined to act against one’s wishes and that to grow means bearing the irrevocable scars of one’s teacher.
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