(Drivebycuriosity) - I like British literature and Ian McEwan belongs to my favorite authors. I enjoyed his novel "Machines like me", about AI, his kinky family tale "Cement Garden" and the spy story "Sweet Tooth" (my reviews here here here). I also like the movie adaptions of "Atonement" & "The Comfort of Strangers".
Unfortunately, "Lessons", his newest opus, doesn`t really work for me (amazon). The novel follows the whole live of a man in the second half of the 20th century, with a splash of alternate history. I still enjoy McEwan`s eloquent style and his frequent setting of commas.
But inspite of all of the literary mastership, I couldn`t care less about the protagonist. I find him pathetic and his professional development - if there was any - chaotic; his relationships & complex family affairs are dysfunctional & confusing. It didn`t help that the plot jumps back and forth in history. And the sex scenes are timid.
The plot is spiced with historical events that happened during the protagonist`s live time like Suez Conflict, Cuba Crises or Chernobyl. But this events, so important they were, did not really influence the protagonist`s live and where just filling material.
There are still some strong scenes and one chapter is immense gripping (but I don´t tell which and why). McEwan`s description of the bleak live in Eastern Germany, the Communist part, before the fall of the wall, deserves a large readership. The author also shows his strength when he writes about sciences (page 294 ff) .
If a talented editor would have cut the novel down to 200 pages from about 400, "Lessons" could have been a strong novel. McEwan could do much better.
PS: The descriptions of calculus, quantum mechanics and entropy are very clear and instructive. I quote some here that I don`t need to read the book again:
Spoiler alarm:
Schrödinger`s "cat`s state is unknown until the chamber is opened. In Schrödinger´s account it is both alive and dead until that moment. In the good outcome, at the reveal, a wave function collapses, while its other version continues as dead in a universe inaccessible to the owner of the cat. By extension, the world divides at every conceivable moment into an infinitude of invisible possibilities.
The Multiple Worlds theory seemed to the protagonist no less impossible than Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.
About entropy and thermodynamics: "In the Second Law, which was the third because they started with zero, he was reminded of a truth obvious to all householders. Just as heat bled out into cold and not the reverse, so order bled out into chaos and never in reverse... The dead never sprang into life, never became the living.....Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself".
Well said, Ian McEwan. Why don`t you write a science novel?
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