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.
Symbols & Motifs
Scent and Memory
For Roland, smell is not only connected to eroticism and desire—it is also intertwined with power and domination. In one of his first and defining encounters with Miss Cornell, Roland remembers how “[h]er perfume overwhelmed his senses and deafened him […] like a hard object, a smooth river stone, pushing in on his thoughts” (3). Cornell’s perfume and “scent” intoxicates the young Roland, controlling and defining the teaching space as her own, and making him more susceptible to seduction.
At the same time, smell is deeply linked to memory. After Alissa has left him, Roland opens a drawer looking for a document and finds Alissa’s jumpers “folded in their neat piles” (106). He says that “the blossomy scent of her perfume breathed on him again with affection” (106). Smell can evoke the memory of a person in an immediate and powerful way. McEwan suggests that smell, cutting through our rational defenses and our attempts to police our memories, puts us directly in touch with a feeling and a moment in the past. In this way it can also put us in touch with something unexpected about ourselves.
The evocative power of smell does not have to be restricted to a specific person. Smell can be linked both to a place and to a vaguer, more ineffable sense of the past, or of something unknown. Driving near his old school, on the way to Cornell’s, Roland describes “the warm air that carried the rotten salt mud tang of the foreshore. A school smell” (252). Likewise, tasting a wine with his family after Daphne’s death, “there came to mind the hike he and Daphne had taken across the Mediterranean island... the still water in the dark blue bay and on the return the scent of wild herbs crushed beneath their dusty boots” (431-32). Smell is connected to loss and pain. Certain smells and scents, and even the memory of them, can evoke a sense of melancholy about the passage of life and of time itself.
Music and Emotional Development
Music, both its appreciation and its playing, is a recurring motif in Lessons. Roland’s feelings about music, and his relationship to it, both reflect and impact his emotional development and provide a context in which he relates to other people. Most obviously, Roland begins his interactions with Cornell through piano playing. He describes how the Bach piece she made him play “was simply here, a school thing, or dark, like a pine forest in winter” (3). In this way, the music reflects Roland’s sense of being lost, and subject to the whims and power of another.
Yet, as Roland gets older and his sexual relationship with Cornell starts, music also becomes the means by which he asserts his independence. Roland “was planning to set up a jazz trio with two older boys” (146); he tries to play a piece of music, “Round Midnight” by Thelonious Monk, that had not been approved by Cornell. Her response, to dismiss the piece as “rubbish,” is not an objective assessment of the music’s worth. Rather, Cornell’s judgment reflects her anxiety that Roland is pulling away from her and will soon no longer be under her control.
Later in his life music is also the context through which Roland meets Alissa. Smuggling Bob Dylan and Velvet Underground albums into East Berlin for two East German friends leads to Roland serendipitously attending a Bob Dylan concert in 1980. It is at this concert, and appropriately after hearing the song “A Simple Twist of Fate,” that Roland meets Alissa, and the grounds are laid for their future relationship. Roland and Alissa bond over the shared sense of rebellion and youthfulness represented by Dylan’s music. Similarly, they are united by a shared sense of hope for the future that such acts from the 1960s represent. As with that historical hope, Roland and Alissa’s relationship does not last, but Roland continues, in his work as a pianist in a hotel, to keep some memory of that hope and joy alive.
European Integration
Both Roland’s life and Lessons, including its retrospective elements, begin in the aftermath of World War II. This was a conflict in which European nations tore each other apart, and in which nationalism and xenophobia, as in the First World War, had contributed to millions of deaths. Yet through the lives of its characters, Lessons charts a redemptive narrative for relations between Europe’s nations.
This is a narrative based on travel, open-mindedness to other cultures, and cosmopolitanism. For example, this is represented most clearly by the character of Jane Farmer, Alissa’s mother. Brought up exclusively in England, she had after the war taken a journey “from London to Munich via Paris and Stuttgart” that was “the most thrilling episode of her life” (78). There she had explored German history, met Heinrich, a German man, and raised a daughter of mixed nationality.
Alissa continues this tradition of pan-European travel and interaction. Rather than staying in Germany, she moves to London, teaches German to English students, and meets Roland, an English man. While Alissa eventually leaves Roland and returns to Germany, she has a child, Lawrence, who follows the same trajectory as Alissa and her mother in terms of cultural exploration. Lawrence travels through Europe when 16. As an adult, he works in Germany and marries a German woman, Ingrid. Ingrid and Lawrence then raise a daughter, Stefanie, who, in being bilingual and bicultural, represents much of what is promising about the project of European integration.
Unfortunately, for Roland, this sense of hope is overshadowed by the resurgence of nationalism. There is growth of the “notion of national grandeur, a general distrust of Germans, of the French, and the rest” (434). This leads Britain to vote for Brexit in 2016, to leave the European Union, and to retreat from cosmopolitan culture and pan-Europeanism. As Roland reflects, toward the end of his life, “walls were going up” and there were “so many lessons unlearned” (474). For Roland, as in so many other areas of politics, the hope of the post-war world, and of a more integrated and tolerant Europe, is starting once more to recede.
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