“By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling wall to the storming of the American Capitol?” Lessons asks. The reunification of Europe glasnost and perestroika Thatcherism and the Aids crisis New Labour and the Iraq invasion Brexit and the pandemic: feckless Roland will drift through it all. He will drift into marriage and fatherhood, he will drift from career to career, and he will drift through postwar Britain. Roland will “drift through an unchosen life” – a creature of reaction. “That’s a prediction, not a curse.” It is both. “You’ll spend the rest of your life looking for what you’ve had here,” Miss Cornell warns him. He will mistrust his memory, his intentions, his desires. Roland will forever struggle to give his encounter with Miss Cornell moral shape, to pin down “the nature of the harm”. The encounter reeks of schoolboy fantasies: an insatiable older woman who offers carnal instruction, then repairs to the kitchen to prepare a Sunday roast.

It is “the moment from which all else fanned out and upwards with the extravagance of a peacock’s tail”. What happens between them in that quiet cottage will score a line across Roland’s life. Roland fears that the world is about to end, and he will die a virgin. The boy, Roland Baines, is 14 his teacher, Miss Cornell, is 25.

He stands on her doorstep in his drainpipe trousers and sharp-toed winklepickers, twitchy with eroticised terror. In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, an English schoolboy arrives unannounced at his piano teacher’s house. Can earnestness be a form of literary rebellion? It’s compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical. McEwan’s 17th novel is old-fashioned, digressive and indulgently long the hero is a gold-plated ditherer, and the story opens with a teenage wank (few books are improved by an achingly sentimental wank).

Reviews of lessons by ian mcewan