You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm joined by my colleague Daniel Saw, a senior editor at the LRB, who has a piece in the current issue of the paper on

Ian McEwen's new novel, Lessons. Hello, Daniel. Hi, Tom. So Lessons is Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan's 17th novel in a career spanning almost 50 years. We won the Booker Prize for

Amsterdam in 1998. Atonement, I think, sold something like 2 million copies and was made into a movie that may or may not have won any Oscars, but it may as well have done if it didn't. So he's one of that, he's a, he appears on lists of, you know, the most powerful people in British culture. And he's a CBE. And he's a, what could be described as as a towering figure in

English letters if you were writing that kind of profile about him. We're not. This isn't

that kind of discussion. So Daniel. Why has this happened before we mentioned lessons? I think

I think it's a good place to begin because you

start to wonder why. The LRB, as you say, the 17th novel, I think this is the 13th or 14th

time the LRB has reviewed in McEwen,

the one that wasn't reviewed was the one he won the Booker Prize for,

merely because he published two in quick succession, is my suspicion.

The other thing that I don't know about to you growing up,

but certainly I, as a teenager, we read the child in time in English at school and he was this, you know, he was one of those figures like Martin

Amos, Kazu Ishiguro, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, these, the idea of, you know, as a a middle class English boy who was interested in books,

they seemed like the writers that one had to pay attention to in the late 80s and early 90s.

I mean, the question of why or how Ian McEwen demands so much of our attention, why certain books demand so much of our time and attention is a good one that maybe we can come back to later after we've discussed this new book.

So who is lessons about?

It's this guy called Roland Baines who lives an ordinary middle-class sort of life.

And through most of the course of the second half of the 20th century, at the book's close, he's in his early 70s.

And he's been through various sort of London scenes.

He's tried to be a poet.

He's taught tennis.

...