46 pages • 1 hour read
Ian McEwanLessons
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Roland approaches and confronts Alissa in the Berlin café. They greet each other, and Roland feels a cascade of conflicting emotions—“anger, sorrow, love, then anger again” (232). Alissa asks how Lawrence is, and Roland responds angrily, asking, “What do you care about Lawrence?” (233).
The man Alissa is with reveals that he is not her boyfriend or lover but her literary agent. Leaving the café, Roland and Alissa talk together, and she attempts to justify leaving Roland by explaining how she wanted to avoid repeating her mother’s life. She also blames what she calls Roland’s “sex-every-day problem” for making her want to leave (238). As they go their separate ways, Alissa gives Roland the English proof of the novel she has written.
In his hotel room later, Roland reads Alissa’s novel, The Journey. The novel begins with a female character, Catherine, working as a secretary for a literary magazine during the Blitz, before traveling to continental Europe after the war’s end. The novel is heavily based on the story of Alissa’s mother, Jane, and, like Jane, Catherine has several affairs during her journey through France and Germany. Catherine is also, in Roland’s view, partially based on Alissa herself. Roland is disappointed that none of the characters seem to bear any resemblance to him. Roland also reflects on how masterfully written The Journey is and how it would have been easier for him if the novel had been poorly written.
Back in London, a few months later, Roland inquires into the whereabouts of Miss Cornell but finds that she left his school in 1965, 25 years ago, and is now believed to be living in Ireland. This leads Roland to recall the summer of 1964, when, staying with his sister in Farnborough, he received his O-level results. All his grades had been F’s, and he rang Cornell, who, hearing about his results, invited him to live with her. However, Roland was given an opportunity to join his school’s sixth form despite his grades, due to his piano-playing talent and the entreaties of sympathetic teachers. When Roland told Cornell about this, she suggested that he stay with her until the school term resumed and that he could decide then.
At Cornell’s house, Cornell locked up Roland’s luggage. Roland admitted that “[h]e would do anything she asked” (252). After they made love, Cornell locked Roland’s clothes in her shed, leaving only pajamas on the bed for him to wear. Roland stayed at her house for the next three days. He had to kill time and play the piano in pajamas during the day while Cornell was out working, before making love in the evenings when she returned. On the third day, three days before Roland’s birthday, Cornell revealed that she was planning a trip for them for his 16th birthday, to get married in Edinburgh. When Roland hesitated and said he was not ready, Cornell told him to leave, which Roland did, reclaiming his locked-up clothes on the way out.
After this incident Roland decided to not go back to school, burning his books as a symbolic gesture, and instead went to stay with his half sister and pursue paid work.
Chapter 8 Summary
Over five years later, in 1995, Roland is working as a tennis instructor as well as a freelance journalist and part-time pianist in a hotel. Roland is also planning on marrying one of his best friends, Daphne, as her husband, his friend Peter, has left her. Roland spends most of his time, when not working or with Daphne, talking and discussing politics with his friends over dinners. Specifically, they discuss the rise of New Labour and Tony Blair. Roland learns that Alissa and her mother have been reconciled by the success of her first novel. The Journey was lauded by critics, one of whom called it a “masterpiece,” “Tolstoyan in sweep, with a Nabokovian delight in the formation of pitch-perfect sentences” (282). Alissa has still not written to Lawrence despite the many letters that he has sent to her.
Two years later, Daphne and Roland are still not married, and Roland’s father has just died of a heart attack. Roland goes to his father’s funeral and reflects on his positive memories of him. For example, he remembers how Robert had one time driven “forty miles to collect eighteen-year-old Roland from a motorway hitch-hiking drop-off” (298).
After the funeral Roland’s mother stays with him, and she reveals the true story of how she and Robert had met. She had claimed, originally, that they had met at the war’s end after her first husband had died. Instead, they had met in 1941, while her husband at the time was still on active service. She had kept this secret to avoid the potential censure it would attract.
Roland finds a note from Daphne after he returns home from dropping his mother back at her house. In the note, Daphne says that since Roland has been reluctant to commit, she is going to return to Peter and try again with him.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Daphne merely confirms what was effectively Roland’s choice. Roland had not really wanted to marry Daphne. The reemergence of Peter, Daphne’s ex, is the means by which both can acknowledge this and put the situation behind them.
Daphne is attractive and successful, sharing common values and history with Roland. They are longtime friends—in Roland’s words, “confidants”—and their living together would also suit their children, two of whom, Lawrence and Gerald, have become best friends. Roland’s stated reasons for not marrying ring true. As he says, “[t]hey were busy, house prices were rising unevenly across the postal districts, and it was less perilous to have two places barely a mile apart” (285). Such mundane concerns, especially given the material comfort of both, do not seem compelling reasons for why Roland would allow marriage with Daphne to slip away.
More plausibly, Roland does not marry Daphne because he is still carrying baggage from his past. Fear of commitment to her may be linked to fear of abandonment caused by his previous wife, Alissa, deserting him a decade earlier. Perhaps Roland does not want to risk reliving the pain created by Alissa’s sudden, and at the time inexplicable, disappearance. Even further back, Roland may be influenced by the impact of his near marriage to Cornell.
One interpretation of Roland’s reluctance to marry Daphne is that marriage, for him, is inextricably linked to being trapped. He is not even 16 when he discovers that Cornell is planning to take him to Edinburgh to marry him; Roland intuits that this means giving up “the world beyond Miriam” (262). Roland realizes that being married would represent a total subsuming of his life and identity into hers, symbolized by how she locks his clothes away. It would mean, as he says, that “[t]he world that included teachers, rugby, the Beatles and all European literature [would not be] available to him” (259). He would be sacrificing everything, and his whole future, to be with her.
However, there also appears to be more to Roland’s reluctance. While Roland does withdraw from Cornell, he also embraces the submission and control that she exercises over him. As he says, “they were indulging in a sexy game with his stuff locked away and he loved her for it” (257). Roland enjoys the thrill of having his freedom taken away by her, of existing only for her. This “game” is amplified by Cornell’s going out during the day. Roland, deprived by his lack of clothes and the ability to go outside or interact with others, is forced to spend his afternoons pining for her return. As he observes, “[t]he kitchen wall clock stopped along with his existence. He hovered over it, his life, supine on the sofa, with nothing left for him but to long for her” (260). Roland’s whole world, his life, even his very sense of time, is made to revolve entirely around Cornell. Roland finds this surrender to be intoxicating. This is demonstrated on an erotic level by Roland’s arousal at the prospect of a “commitment for life” to Cornell (264).
In contrast, marriage to Daphne appears to be somewhat inoffensive. Their plan to “merge households” is eminently reasonable and in both of their interests but is for that reason unexciting. Marriage with Daphne is the socially validated liberal “partnership,” which “everyone said […] would be a good idea” (308). It is the consensual, practical, and equal basis for a contented life. Such a partnership lacks the passion and emotional extremes that accompany the total submission and domination Roland found with Cornell. This is why Cornell is in one sense correct in her warning to Roland—"You’ll spend the rest of your life looking for what you’ve had here” (264).
Roland’s lack of urgency in marrying Daphne, like their “increasingly sporadic” sex life, reflects this absent passion. Roland craves, at least on some level, the loss of control and freedom, and the madness, of what he found when he was 15. Roland resists marrying Daphne not, for the most part, because he is afraid of giving up too much freedom. Rather he resists marriage because the sacrifice of freedom demanded by her is not significant, or extreme, enough.
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