Leaving school early? If he had stayed, Miriam, by her own admission, would have hauled him from the classroom and he would have been sunk. Marrying Alissa? Without Lawrence there would have been no joy, no Stefanie, Roland’s new best friend.

But in surveying a life it was inadvisable to acknowledge too much defeat. On this last he may have been deluding himself. On close examination the errors dissolved into questions, hypotheticals, even into solid gains. Among his subjects were other single starting errors that multiplied through time into a fan-shaped array. He had a chair, a view, a certain glass he favoured. These days he ate less, drank more and thought a lot. When he looks back, as he often does, it’s with the same mixture of speculation, resignation, satisfaction, and self-reproach that probably most of us become familiar with as we pass from youth into middle age: Roland is not Pip, reflecting on his earlier life from the moral vantage point of the end of his Bildungsroman. He is, but not because of any grand epiphany, just because he is older and has been through a lot. The novel’s title suggests that these accumulated experiences teach him something, that the Roland on the last page will be knowing in a way that the Roland we meet at the outset of the novel is not. He just gets older, and as he does, things happen: people come and go, priorities change, happy times give way to sad ones, opportunities are seized or missed, regrets arise then are displaced by more immediate crises or distractions. Like Logan Mountstuart, Roland Baines doesn’t really develop: he acquires no particular wisdom or insight over the years. Ian McEwan’s Lessons is what I think of as a “soup to nuts” novel, one that, like William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, earns our interest in its protagonist just by sticking with him. His summaries were hasty, without interest. He disliked himself for complaining onto the page-about living hand to mouth, not having the right kind of work, not making a long and successful marriage. In those sections it was if he was reading of someone else’s past.

A grand mass of detail was what he found and events, conversations, even people that he could not remember. There were no obvious themes, no undercurrents he had not noticed at the time, nothing learned.

Reading back since 1986 did not bring him any fresh understanding of his life.

Machines like me analysis