‘I don’t feel too positive about this’: U.K. writer Ian McEwan reflects on our current historical moment

Midway through our phone interview, spotty Wi-Fi drives Ian McEwan out into the rain.

The Booker Prize-winning author was vacationing on the west coast of Scotland, where the internet service was not entirely reliable (a boon for a writer in any other situation, one imagines), and the phone was cutting in and out. After a series of attempts to find a signal indoors, McEwan moved outside where, typical for a coastal Scotland evening, it was grey and inclement.

“It’s just a Scotch mist,” McEwan said gamely, having found shelter under an overhang.

The image of the author taking refuge from the rain alone in the rural west of Scotland brings to mind nothing so much as the protagonist in an Ian McEwan novel. Over a career that has spanned close to five decades, McEwan has mined the lives and psyches of characters who frequently find themselves isolated by chance or, more often, their own devising. Insiders become outsiders in McEwan’s work, frequently resulting in reckonings that involve sudden and intense violence.

The occasion for our late-summer phone call was the incipient publication of McEwan’s 16th novel, “Lessons,” his first full-length work of fiction since 2019’s “Machines Like Me.” (The Brexit-meets-Kafka novella “The Cockroach” appeared the same year.) The new novel is a whopper: at almost 500 pages, it is McEwan’s longest book, blowing past 2001’s “Atonement,” which clocked in at a relatively svelte 370 pages.

“I really wanted to take my time and inhabit a novel,” he said of “Lessons,” which he began sketching out in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to a standstill.

The pandemic makes a cameo appearance in the final stages of “Lessons,” which tells the story of Roland, a British boy in postwar England sent off to boarding school where he encounters a predatory music teacher named Miriam Cornell. The school — minus, we are assured in a note at the end, anyone resembling Miriam — bears a certain similarity to the one McEwan himself attended as a youngster (right down to the name of the English teacher). This is not the only autobiographical detail in the novel, which also includes the discovery, in adulthood, of a long-lost brother.

Typical of McEwan, who enjoys mining real-world events for his fiction (the Second World War in “Atonement”; Sept. 11 in “Saturday”), Roland’s personal history is overlaid upon the signal events of the past decades: the Cuban missile crisis, the Chernobyl meltdown, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sept. 11 (again) and the invasion of Iraq all crop up as Roland tries to navigate the warp and woof of existence.

In this regard, Roland does double duty, charting the rough trajectory of the decades that make up his creator’s own life and being an avatar for a regular person buffeted by the winds of history, of events beyond his control. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s an everyman,” McEwan said of Roland. “He does reflect the way we are all novelists in our own lives, constantly writing and rewriting drafts.”

As Roland grows into adulthood — which includes marriage, fatherhood, divorce and a reckoning that, as a failed poet, he will forever live in the professional shadow of his ex-wife Alissa, who abandons her family to pursue a celebrated writing career — he also comes to a psychic reckoning with the events of his past. In so doing, Roland embodies Soren Kierkegaard’s dictum that life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward. It’s a perspective the McEwan of “Lessons” has a great deal of sympathy with. “I could not have written this novel as a young man,” said the author, who is now 74 years old.

In attempting to draw Roland’s life over a span of 80 years, McEwan has also made something of a return to form in his embrace of realism following a trio of books — “Nutshell,” “Machines Like Me” and “The Cockroach” — that veered into antirealism or surrealism. According to the author, who got his start writing frankly Gothic works that contained outré material including bestiality and necrophilia, the realist mode is what he is most driven toward. “Where my heart is, and always has been, is engaging with the world we share and plausibly re-enacting it on the page, which is actually high artifice,” he said. “The whole business of how we dictate our fates is what fascinates me.”

The question of how we create our own lives out of the raw material of existence necessarily implies morality, and one of the moral questions at the heart of “Lessons” involves whether Alissa is justified in abandoning her spouse and child to pursue her art.

This is something, it should be noted, male artists have done since time immemorial, without repercussions, at least until modern feminism came to the fore. For his part, McEwan does not consider it necessary to be completely ruthless in order to create good art, though he feels it is nevertheless permissible to mine reality in the pursuit of an artistic vision. Though for McEwan, that vision is necessarily filtered through the tactics of fiction.

“For many years, I used to envy writers like Dickens, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, who not only plundered their past but plundered their present,” he said. “For myself, I was always on the side of invention.”

The relative morality of the characters’ actions — not just Roland and Alissa, but Miriam and the other secondary figures in the novel — is a facet of McEwan’s fiction that has long held pride of place. “I think there is a moral quality to a life that is inevitably transferred to the moral quality of a novel,” McEwan said. “But I say this knowing that some of the most terrible people have been great artists. It’s one of the huge conundrums when we think about art and life.”

In addition to personal morality and ethics, an anxiety about history is all over the pages of “Lessons.” The strains of geopolitics, the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear war weigh heavily on Roland, as they do on his creator. “Had I decided to write on longer, I would have included the war in Ukraine,” said McEwan. “There’s something terribly reminiscent of Soviet troops entering Berlin in 1945.”

In some ways, the novel suggests, the lessons of history, while there for anyone who cares to look, are too often ignored or forgotten in the quotidian hurly-burly of attempting to forge a life from day to day. But in the same way that Roland keeps returning to the events of the world outside his own window, McEwan ultimately can’t avoid acknowledging the tenuousness of our current historical moment. “I don’t feel too positive about this,” he said. “I’ve rather lent Roland my foreboding.”

The kind of foreboding that is perfectly captured, one imagines, by a lone figure on the Scottish west coast, huddled under a shelter out of the rain.

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