The protagonist, Roland Baines, was born in June 1948, which makes him the same age as Ian McEwan and a few months older than King Charles. It’s a reminiscence, sometimes fond, sometimes self-flagellating – and, for large stretches, it’s properly, Englishly, boring. Instead, like a biography of Dickens or Byron, this book is nearly cradle to grave: it describes sixty years of a life from the perspective of a man who wants to know what accidents led him to be where and who he is. Autofiction typically shows what it’s like to exist in a single period of life through an assembly of indicative moments. It’s not an autobiography, but it’s close, much closer than the ‘autobiographical novel’ usually is, or than ‘autofiction’ is. The ‘lessons’ of the title aren’t meant to be lessons in how to write an English novel, but they might as well be: it’s the sort of book only an English man of a certain age would set out to write – and the sort of book such a man will one day inevitably write if he’s fully committed to his role. Ian McEwan’s new novel is as English as they come. Oddly, this means that the caricature of Englishness – the condition of being awkward, self-abasing, endlessly apologetic – is much closer to the experience of being English than you would expect from a caricature. It’s easy to be embarrassed to be English, embarrassed by privilege, entitlement and insular prejudice. There are duties to uphold, expectations to fulfil. Or at least a certain type of English novelist, of a certain English vintage, from a certain English background. I t must be tough to be an English novelist.
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