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Lessons is a meticulously written combination of a period piece and a slice of life. Although it is the obvious fiction, the axis of the story is apparently based on some facts of Ian McEwan’s life.
The narration begins with the hero’s wife walking out on him, leaving him behind with a helpless infant boy and a brief valedictory message lying on the pillow��

To Roland, from this threshold everything looked randomly imposed as though he had been lowered from a forgotten place into these circumstances, into a life vacated by someone else, nothing chosen by himself. The house he never wanted to buy and couldn’t afford. The child in his arms he never expected or needed to love. The random traffic moving too slowly past the gate that was now his and that he would never repair.

Gradually his memory limns the picture of the past: his childhood, his war generation parents and in-laws, acquaintance with his future wife, political climate, his school, music lessons and his immature love affair with his music teacher��

She crossed the room and went into the kitchen. Watching her bare white feet, hearing their scuffing sound on the flagstones, made him feel weak. A couple of minutes later she came back with glasses of orange juice, actual crushed oranges, a novel taste. By then, he was standing uncertainly by the low table, wondering if now he was expected to leave. He would not have minded. They drank in silence. Then she put her glass down and did something that almost caused him to faint. He had to steady himself against the arm of a sofa. She went to the front door, knelt and sank the heavy door bolt into the stone floor. Then she came back and took his hand.
“Come on then.��

His precocious love prevented him from completing his studying�� This way his grownup life commenced�� From place to place�� From post to pillar�� He turned into a kind of intellectual drifter: a photographer, tennis coach, hotel lounge pianist, freelancing journalist, magazine reviewer, failed poet�� Then he fell in love and got married�� But his wife had ambitions and aspirations�� She considered him standing in her way��

“All right. She too deceived herself in marriage. She thought you were a brilliant bohemian. Your piano playing seduced her. She thought you were a free spirit. Just the way I thought Heinrich was a hero of the resistance and would go on being one. You misled her. ‘He’s a fantasist, Mutti, he can’t settle to anything. He’s got problems in his past he won’t even think about. He can’t achieve anything. And nor can I. Together we were sinking. Then there was the baby and we sank faster. Neither of us were ever going to achieve anything.’��

Did he wish for vengeance? Time isn’t just a healer�� Time is also a perfect avenger�� However it revenges upon both sides��
An implicit question is posed: is it better to live a common life among friends and earthly delights or to become a soulless automaton mechanically achieving goal after goal and exist in cosmic vacuum?
Life tries to teach us many lessons �� some of which we learn and some we ignore.