Like Ian McEwan, Roland Baines was born in 1948, the son of a prominent military man in Libya, and was sent to boarding school in the United Kingdom. And his life has crossed the great events of the middle of the 20th century to the present day and, although that of Baines, protagonist of his latest novel, Lessons (which Anagrama has just published in Catalan and Spanish), ” he went in another direction”, its creator assumes that “he is the kind of person he could have been if he had not discovered writing: he might have ended up playing the piano in a bar, as a tennis teacher, a poet or a mason “.
“For the last 25 years I’ve been asked to write my memoirs, and then I’d forget about them and get absorbed in the next novel, so to a certain extent these are my memoirs,” he explains.
McEwan began writing this book with an “overview of all the political crises that have had an impact on my life, starting with the Suez Canal crisis, through the fall of the Berlin Wall, and up to the pandemic or the assault on the US Capitol”. From then on he thought that his protagonist “would have some connections with me, with the life of my family and the life of my parents”, and he tried to “find out what was behind the vague scenes that I was writing , with some fundamental confrontations”, such as the consequences, throughout his life, of the piano lessons of a teacher with whom he will have an experience that is both fascinating and traumatic, or how he will face – already in 1987 – the surprise abandonment and without explanations from his wife.
Thus, McEwan was “advancing with Roland by the arm and ringing bells with him not knowing exactly what would end up happening”, seeing that “there are dark moments in our lives that are not completely resolved, either we forget them or they become part of who you are,” he explains.
In any case, for the author of Atonement “the novel is the most beautiful machine we have invented to investigate private life and its relationship with society in the broadest sense”, a genre, moreover, that “if the literary novel had to die, it would have died years ago”, because neither television series nor video games, nor even poetry, he asserts, allow “to penetrate the minds of other people like this”, since ” it is the best way to illustrate the stream of consciousness”.
Lessons also allows him to ask “to what extent do we have options or if life is not a succession of reactions to different episodes in the hands of chance”, since he constantly relates the great historical facts to the intimate lives of the people. In his case, for example, he says that while writing he realized that “the Suez crisis pushed me to become a writer”.
In any case, he concludes: “At the age of 70 I have learned that it is very difficult to transform a life into words that are not a cliché, my only way would be to write a life and this novel is my lesson; it’s the only advice I can really give.”
