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From The Sunday Times

March 7, 2010

Solar by Ian McEwan

The Sunday Times review by Peter Kemp

Ian McEwan’s new novel — a comedy every bit as brilliant as its title might
suggest — takes readers into the mind of a Nobel prize-winning physicist.
Readers should immediately be reassured, though, that this isn’t a painful
experience. Michael Beard, short, fat, bald and 53 years old when the story
starts, hasn’t done any cutting-edge thinking about science for decades. Since a
remarkable youthful breakthrough when his pioneering contribution to quantum
theory, the Beard-Einstein Conflation, won him a Nobel laureateship, he has
coasted, resting on his laurels. Scientific sinecures, remunerative media
appearances and lavish jaunts to international conventions have kept him in
comfort. Now more bureaucrat than scientist, he heads a research establishment,
the Centre for Renewable Energy, set up by a government eager to advertise its
resolve to combat climate change.

When we first meet Beard, in 2000, his fifth marriage has just hit the rocks,
his 11th affair having proved the last straw to his current wife who, in
retaliation, has taken up with a builder recently working on their house. Scenes
of sardonic comedy chart Beard’s fraught responses to this and his growing
exasperation with the nerdy zeal of young physicists working for him at the
centre. To escape these irritants, he accepts an invitation to visit the Arctic
with a group of artists and scientists concerned with global warming — a
phenomenon about which at this point he is privately sceptical.

The ensuing interlude in and around a luxuriously appointed boat in a fjord
blends farce and finesse. Mishaps to Beard’s genitals amid the subzero rigours
of the environment, and other bodily fiascos, are retailed with near-slapstick
gusto. Irony flickers over the ecowarriors spewing noxious emissions from their
vehicles as they tour the pristine snowscapes they are keen to protect (carbon
footprints imposed by the trip are to be “offset by planting 3,000 trees in
Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed”).
Well-intentioned artworks they create — “sentinel” snowmen and ice sculptures of
polar bears — are wryly surveyed.

But behind the comedy lurk more sober themes. The boat’s storage room where
essential outdoor gear (boots, balaclavas, padded suits and the like) is
supposed to be carefully stowed soon deteriorates into a shambles as items are
mislaid, broken or purloined. Seeing this as epitomising the tendency of human
nature to reduce order and sufficiency to muddle and lack, Beard himself
becomes, as the book proceeds, another specimen of this fatal propensity.

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Capturing every nuance of absurdity, McEwan records pratfalls that upend his
hero during the eventful decade after his return from the Arctic — such as being
led away in handcuffs after jokily lobbing a soft tomato back at a female
demonstrator who flung it to convey her outrage at his (non-existent) evil
eugenic views. Comic high spots range from an expertly built-up escalation of
happenings involving a bag of salt and vinegar crisps on a train from Heathrow
to cameos of pests accosting Beard before he gives a speech (“a soft-spoken man
with a stutter wanted to tell him about his son’s physics exam, and then a tall
man with a stoop and a jutting ginger beard and large accusing eyes set eerily
far apart introduced himself…”).

Often a source of comedy, Beard simultaneously emerges as a podgy emblem of
instincts that have brought our species to its present hazardous pass.
Voraciously self-indulgent, he doesn’t only womanise on a prodigal scale. During
the novel he puts on more than three stone as he ingests loads of provender:
kilos of salted nuts, fistfuls of “beef-glazed, toasted corn-type” snacks,
“cubes of belly pork mounted on a hill-fort of buttered rice”, Everests of ice
cream, mounds of deep-fried appetisers, pancakes and meats. A waddling time bomb
of high cholesterol, he embodies the feckless negligence and greed endangering
not only him but the planet whose resources are being heedlessly devoured.

Within this flabby, multi-chinned, loose-wattled organism, though, a
first-rate brain still functions. And recounting Beard’s efforts to use it to
fight global warming, about which he has become convinced, the book opens up
another dimension of McEwan’s genius as a novelist. Easily the brightest
fictional mind we have, he has done the formidable research necessary to bring
credibility not only to Beard’s schemes to tap solar energy through artificial
photosynthesis but to the novel’s depiction of the world of physics and
physicists in which he moves. Quantum field theory is made elegantly accessible.
When characters mention M-theory, Nambu Lie 3-algebra and coincident M2-branes,
you feel pretty sure McEwan knows what they are talking about.

Arty condescension towards scientists keeps being skewered. As a physics
student at Oxford “attempting to come to terms with some of the hardest things
ever thought”, Beard is patronised by the English literature undergraduate who
becomes his first wife for studying a “non-subject”. In the Arctic, he loses his
cool when a novelist vapours vacuously on about how Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle proves morality is relative. A savagely funny scene has a
postmodernist spouting piffle to a line-up of politely embarrassed scientists
about genes being “entexted”.

Milton’s great hymn to light in Paradise Lost once proved handy to Beard as a
seduction aid. And sizzling lucidity distinguishes this enormously entertaining
novel about rationality and unreason. Right up to its final moment — teasingly
poised between the heart-warming and heart-stopping as nemesis arrives for Beard
— scarcely a page fails to dazzle with some wittily caught perception about
contemporary life. Blazing with imaginative and intellectual energy, Solar is a
stellar performance.

Solar by Ian McEwan
Cape £18.99 pp285

Available at the Sunday Times Bookshop price of £17.09 (including p&p)
on 0845 271 2135

Ian McEwan and Craig Raine will be discussing their new novels at the
Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Friday, March 26, at 6pm. To book, vist
www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com

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