Like Ian McEwan, Roland Baines was born in 1948, the son of a soldier stationed in Libya and was sent to boarding school in the United Kingdom. And his life has gone through the great events of the mid-20th century to the present day and, although Baines' life, the protagonist of his latest novel, Lessons (which Anagrama has just published in Spanish and Catalan), “advanced in another direction”, his The creator assumes that “he is the type of person he could have been if he had not discovered writing: perhaps he would have ended up playing the piano in a bar, as a tennis teacher, a poet or a bricklayer.”
“For the last 25 years I have been asked to write my memoirs, and then I would forget and get absorbed in the next novel, so in a way these are my memoirs,” he says.
McEwan began writing this book thinking about an “overview of all the political crises that had had an impact on my life, starting with the Suez Canal crisis, through the fall of the Berlin Wall and even the pandemic or the assault on the US Capitol.” From there he thought that his protagonist would have “some connections with me, with the life of my family and the life of my parents”, and he tried to “discover what was behind the vague scenes that he was writing, with some fundamental confrontations” , such as the consequences, throughout his life, of the piano lessons of a teacher with whom he will have an experience as fascinating as it is traumatic, or how he will face – already in 1987 – the surprise and unexplained abandonment of his wife.
Thus, McEwan was “moving forward with Roland hand in hand and ringing bells with him without knowing exactly what was going to happen,” seeing that “there are dark moments in our lives that are not resolved, we either forget them or they become part of who are you".
In any case, for the author of Atonement "the novel is the most beautiful machinery that we have invented to investigate private life and its relationship with society in the broadest sense", a genre, furthermore, that "if the literary novel had If he had to die, he would have died years ago", because neither television series nor video games, not even poetry, he assures, allows him to "penetrate like this into the minds of other people", because "it is the best way to illustrate the flow of consciousness ”.
In the case of Lessons, it also allows you to ask yourself “to what extent we have options or if life is not a succession of reactions to different episodes in the hands of chance”, by constantly relating the great historical events with the intimate lives of the people. people. In his case, for example, he assures that while writing he realized that “the Suez crisis pushed me to be a writer.”
In any case, he concludes: “At 70 years old I have learned that it is very difficult to transform a life into words that are not a cliché, my only way would be to write a life and this novel is my lesson; It’s the only advice I can really give.”
Catalan version, here
