The encounter reeks of schoolboy fantasies: an insatiable older woman who offers carnal instruction, then repairs to the kitchen to prepare a Sunday roast. It is “the moment from which all else fanned out and upwards with the extravagance of a peacock’s tail”. What happens between them in that quiet cottage will score a line across Roland’s life. Roland fears that the world is about to end, and he will die a virgin. The boy, Roland Baines, is 14 his teacher, Miss Cornell, is 25. He stands on her doorstep in his drainpipe trousers and sharp-toed winklepickers, twitchy with eroticised terror. In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, an English schoolboy arrives unannounced at his piano teacher’s house. Can earnestness be a form of literary rebellion? It’s compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical. McEwan’s 17th novel is old-fashioned, digressive and indulgently long the hero is a gold-plated ditherer, and the story opens with a teenage wank (few books are improved by an achingly sentimental wank).
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