Interspersed with the Miriam scenes are sections that take place throughout Roland’s future, starting in 1986. Roland begins to understand that Miriam is a lunatic, and that her flavor of lunacy is not the kind that can be sprinkled over his life as a zesty enhancement but the kind that leads directly to squalor and despair.

It’s not a proposal but a command: Roland is to show up at the registry office, pen in hand, and do her bidding.Īfter a passel of potential last straws, the marriage dictum does the trick. At dinner one night, she slides an envelope across the table containing marriage paperwork. She locks the boy’s clothing and money in a shed, keeping him hostage. Intercourse with Roland is the queasiest but not the only expression of Miriam’s monstrosity. He doesn’t make that journey until a bit later, when he is 14 and Miriam 25. Then she plants a kiss on his mouth, and invites him - orders him - to visit her at home during the next school holiday. His piano instructor is the rosewater-scented Miss Miriam Cornell, a pretty sadist who pinches Roland’s thigh when he biffs a section of Bach. Roland is 11 years old and it is time he received a proper education: Latin, French, cricket, rugby, piano. Roland’s father is part of the British Army contingent in North Africa his mother works at a Y.M.C.A. Roland Baines and his parents arrive in London from Libya in the late summer of 1959. His characters are occasionally lecherous, often bitter and always secularly human. He specializes in the mental life of one particular, culturally endemic type: the contemporary middle-class British male. Nobody is better at writing about entropy, indignity and ejaculation - among other topics - than Ian McEwan.

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