PositiveAustralian Book Review (AUS)Roland...is less an active human agent than an accumulation of geological strata laid down over time: a man who can stand for the mediocre many ... If the existence rendered in these pages is remarkable mostly for its ordinariness, the novelistic structure containing it is anything but. Lessons’ sole epigraph comes from Finnegans Wake. Readers soon sense the strenuous efforts made by the author to honour James Joyce’s circular sense of history ... Lessons...is a word whose sense shifts from the plainly instructive to the ominously punitive as the chapters pass ... If these virtuosic runs back and forth in time elevate Lessons over the usual state-of-the-nation novel, McEwan’s urge to editorialise remains. The book’s weakest moments occur when Roland is shoved by his creator into proximity with grand events of the era ... Stronger are moments resolutely private and domestic in scope ... McEwan also allows surprising tenderness in his depiction of family relations, albeit with a sharp eye for the fractures and torsions that nuclear families exhibit ... The formal patterning and historical scope of Lessons are impressive.
