by Ian McEwan
I really enjoyed the last book I read by McEwan, Machines Like Me. It was fascinating and thought provoking.
I absolutely hated this book and had to force myself to finish it....I skimmed over the last 60 pages.
This is the story of a man Roland Baines who really has a sad life. As a child his soldier father and mother ship him off to boarding school at an early age. His mother had two children from a previous marriage but they also have been shipped off so he does not have much contact with them til he is an adult.
While he is at boarding school the Cuban Missle Crisis occurs. The boys at the school are worried about the end of the world and that they will die without having had sex. Roland starts taking music lessons with a female music teacher. She thinks he has talent but she also lusts after him. Roland quits lessons and his school work suffers but eventually he goes to her place and they start having an affair. Eventually he goes to live with her and she basically keeps him trapped in her house, wearing pajamas all the time. She plans for them to go to Scotland when he is 16 where it will be legal for them to marry. He is shocked at this news and leaves her.
It was thought he could have a brilliant musical career but he doesn't go on to university and instead drifts around different jobs and with different women. He seems obsessed with sex but unable to commit.
Eventually he meets a woman and marries her. He is trying a career as a poet without much success. They have a baby and when the baby is about 18 months old his wife leaves him. At first the police think he may have killed her but she sends sporadic postcards for awhile.
When he happens to be in Berlin at the fall of the wall he happens to see his wife in a restaurant. She a become a successful author. She tells him she wants no contact with him or her son. Her mother felt that her life was ruined, her career plans erased, when she had children and Roland's wife doesn't want that to be her fate.
Roland reads her books and realizes she is a great author and that she probably couldn't have achieved what she did staying with him. He raises their son and seems to be a caring father. He seems to scrape by playing piano in a hotel bar at night.
Eventually he meets another woman and they start a relationship but while their two sets of kids get along they keep separate households. He thinks of asking her to marry him but doesn't get around to it. He is sad when she decides to get back with her abusive husband.
His son eventually finds his mother and she basically slams the door in his face saying she wants nothing to do with him.
At one point Roland goes to see the piano teacher and threatens to expose her. She doesn't think he has proof but he has the train tickets and marriage licence. He decides not to proceed with anything.
Eventually Roland gets back with the second woman, who has divorced her husband. He asks her to marry him but before they get married she finds she has stage 4 cancer. He looks after her til she dies.... what is the world trying to tell me, many thinks I have read/watched laterly are about spouses dying o cancer. It is so depressing.....
Anyway, the woman asked Roland to sprinkle her ashes but a bridge in the country but only when he was ready to do it. Her ex starts bugging him to get the ashes to disperse them or come along. Roland knows his wife wants her ex not to have anything to do with that. He sets off to the country and is in the process of scattering the ashes when the ex shows up. They wrestle, the ex pushes him off the bridge and dumps the ashes.
Roland returns home "somewhat sad" about what transpired. He is not alone. He seems to have a good family around him, his son, step children and their partners and a german granddaugter who really loves him.
Shortly after his ex wife gets in contact with him through her publisher. She says she wants to see him. She is in a wheelchair as she has had to have a foot amputated. He is furious with her because in her last book she wrote of a couple, living in the town they lived in. The woman in the story left an abusive husband. He believes people will think she is writing about him. She dismisses this saying people will know it is fiction. She tells him that she really did love him but his neediness was too much for her.
Various stages of the man's life mention major historical events: Bay of Pigs, Chernobyl, Berlin wall coming down, Brexit and the pandemic. Not sure what the point of that was... other than to place his life in a particular time period.
I hated this guy, he had no drive, just seemed to float through life. The only thing he seems to have done right was his care for his son. I know he had a traumatic childhood but geeze pick yourself up and make some decisions. I hated the guys wife for what she did to him and their child. The piano teacher was despicable.
Some reviewers say the book is reflecting the ennui of our times.... maybe. But I certainly did not enjoy any part of it.
