As in, I’m finding it hard to express my feelings about this book. Not because I enjoyed it (I didn’t). Eloquence is overrated anyway.
The plot: a young boy in 1960s England is sent to boarding school, is molested by his (female) piano teacher, then has a relationship with her that lasts for years and hampers him for the rest of his life. We watch Roland Baines grow up, faff around, have a child, fall in and out of love. The red thread in the novel is, in fact, the endless faffing about: Roland can never seem to get up to much. There is a distinct lack of agency running through his life, caused by the complicated affair that he had as a child. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Roland simply is a world-class ditherer.
The Guardian called this novel ‘indulgently long’ and they’re not wrong. I love many of McEwan’s books, but they’ve rarely felt like they dragged this much. Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach, even Solar (which I hated) all had more oomph, more punch. I get that this is the point of the book; I just didn’t enjoy the point very much. The narrative picks up steam when it talks about Roland’s mother in law and his wife, but it doesn’t necessarily feel more enjoyable. The women in the book all seem to be fed up with Roland’s lack of drive, and though I can sympathise, they are all pretty horrible creatures in their own way and it’s hard to sympathise. I’m still struggling with what to make of Alyssa, Roland’s wife and the mother of their son, who ups and leaves when the child is still an infant and then militantly refuses to have anything to do with her child, instead becoming the Most Famous Writer Ever. There could be a feminist parable in there, or a point about a woman refusing to bow to societal norms, but it’s all handled so oddly that that’s not how I took it; I just found her deeply unsympathetic.
Perhaps I should take the book as an indictment against the Boomers, that generation frequenly accused (not unjustly) of exaggerating their struggles while coasting by on the nanny state, never once seeing their own luck. The generation that gave us Brexit. That’s probably what McEwan is trying to say here, except I stopped caring about halfway through and finished the novel on sheer willpower (I picked this for my book club. They all hate me now). I didn’t enjoy it at all. Roland’s indecision might be the point, but it makes for a frustrating read. There’s no reward to be had. Even the novel’s ending is like the rest of Roland’s life: dull, apathetic and lacklustre.
