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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor-ed of The Spectator, and my guest this week is the

novelist Ian McEwen, whose new book is called Lessons.

Welcome in.

Now, the Lessons of the Title, what are are they and how do they shape the book well

the lessons really reflect a whole life so i'm used to using character as a method of discussing

and reflecting on human nature and i thought it'd be interesting to do what we all do is just

try and take in our

minds what do our lives amount to so the lessons are simply hard hard experience and Roland has various

not so entirely exceptional but enough cumulatively to form a narrative that endlessly shifts and I think

that's what one lesson is the story we tell ourselves

is never once and forever fixed.

It's a mutable and highly arrangible story.

And so its central figure, Roland Baines,

makes many attempts to understand his own existence,

to grasp it and then to let it

fall from his grasp and then come to other understandings. If you ask someone, what are the

lessons of life? You'll just get banalities. This is the problem. I mean, like be kind or love

conquers all or whatever. And yet, surely we must have learned something hanging around for 70 or 80 years.

Not easy to pass on. There is a moment right at the end when Roland is almost not quite dead, but sort of ill.

...