A long recent analysis of the book and discussion with McEwan in The Atlantic drew my attention to this, his latest novel.
Poet, talented musician, and restless manual labourer Roland Blaines and his son, Lawrence are principle characters in this British and German tale. It begins in 1986 when Roland’s wife Alissa leaves them to become a famous novelist. (A subtle underling theme throughout concerns the inherent conflict of highly ambitious professionals between achieving fame and advancing in a career and the inevitable sacrifices one has to make to properly raise children.) But the story then reaches back several decades and forwards to mid 2021. In his youth, Roland, like McEwan, is sent by his military family in Tripoli to a strict English boys boarding school in Ipswich, which makes me wonder how much of the rest of the story tale is also autobiographical. Later, Roland also works to free a East German couple and their two girls from the tyrannical punishment of the Stasi for saying something intolerable, and particularly grieves over the punishment of the children.
Roland’s criminal seduction at age 14 by his female piano teacher, Miriam, (hence the title) has lasting long unrecognized psychic effects that make him into a sex-obsessed misfit who can never find satisfaction in other activities or with other women, and she is portrayed as a very manipulative, controlling nymphomaniac.The description of the many sexual encounters is unnecessarily pornographic and the frequency of their gymnastic sex is a also bit unrealistic. Exploitation of children and their vulnerability is a recurring theme in McEwan’s novels and made me wonder if it is also reflects his personal experience. (The Atlantic article refers to this book as his anti-autobiography.)
Roland’s muddled bemused understanding of the modern physics of time, space, light, matter, gravity, quantum mechanics, wave theory, the alternate or multiple universes theory, and the thought experiment known as Shrodinger’s cat reflect my own limited comprehension of such complexities.
The slow painful death from cancer of Roland’s late wife is described with too much sentimentality for my liking but it also constitutes a passionate and compelling plea for legalizing medical assistance in dying. The deathly fight between Roland and her ex over where to scatter her ashes is entertaining and imaginative.
The fluid engaging writing rescues this book from any risk of boring readers. It includes memorable descriptions from the culture, history, and customs of 1950s including the rigid rules of British boarding schools, being at Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate when the Berlin Wall fell, the fear gripping the world during the Cuban missile crisis and the Chernobyl meltdown, Thatcherism, but also overly vivid descriptions of the many sexual encounters of the characters. Some of McEwan known atheistic nihilism appears in Roland’s musings. Roland “….”steps out of ordinary existence to be reminded…that he was an insignificant being on a giant rock rolling eastward at one thousand miles per hour as it hurtled through the emptiness among the remote indifferent stars.” Onhuman existence: “How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life in a succession of reactions to events.” Of the views of children in the 1950’s: “ They were not beings in their own right….transient proto-humans endlessly, year after year in the graceless act of becoming.” Roland is slow to acknowledge his mother’s descent into dementia until he discovers a bar of soap in her refrigerator and the decline thereafter is described in realistic detail. Her surprising activities during WWll is revealed only after her death. Roland’s bleak assessment of the current world situation in the last chapter hints at a future book about dystopian 22nd century.
The convoluted story includes the overused tropes of writing about novelists and novels within novels, and includes discussion of several dozen novels and old music pieces, which seems like a kind attempt of the author to prove that he belongs to the literati and intelligentsia. There is at least one blatant anatomical error: “Her irises were pinpricks.”
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Thanks, Din Lal
The Passionate Reader 