Solar

I am forever playing catch-up with prolific writers like Ian McEwan, who has published 17 novels (and I have managed  to read just 6: Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement, Solar, Machines like Me).

Solar, I found on the street library, and I am reluctant to put it back. The book deals, in a comic sort of way, with the climate crisis through the story of a Nobel prize-winner, a physicist, who appears to be more interested in his peccadilloes than his protons. McEwan opens his book with a line that only an established male writer could get away with: ‘He belonged to that class of men – vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, fat, clever – who are unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women’ (3). “Unaccountable” is the key to the sentence: Michael Beard has a string of ex-wives, one on the way out and a lover to compensate; but he has money and a degree of fame, and that (perhaps) accounts for the unaccountable.

In the manner of English novels written by men about flawed men – a not-insubstantial genre – Beard is up to no good while engaged in a noble cause. A substantial section of the book involves a visit to the Artic, where -- in a comic scene -- he nearly loses his penis while attempting to take a leak in sub-zero temperatures. There is also plenty of drama, mainly centred over his wife’s affair and Beard’s rivals, expected and unexpected (with violence, death and the burial of evidence).

There are three parts to the novel: 2000, 2005 and 2009. This approach (seen in other McEwan novels) allows the story to move forward by degrees of causation and consequence. I am not sure if this is an intention, but Beard “gets away with it” for a time, only to get his just deserts in the novel’s conclusion. Perhaps a lack of action on the climate crisis is suggested by the broader failure to make progress, with a reckoning to come. In the meantime, McEwan captures the pointless debates from the viewpoint of a scientist who reaches for another Californian red, while an investor repeats gossip from business people denying the crisis: ‘They’re saying the scientists have gotten it wrong but don’t dare to admit it, Too many careers and reputations on the line’ (215).

It must be commonplace in the COVID-19 year for writers to be simultaneously busy with their craft (what else is there to do?) while wondering what possible function it might serve (like writing a sonnet as the Titanic goes down). This book was published in 2010, but in general McEwan’s response, it seems to me, is to write fast and get some points across while he can (as the water rises, etc.). This sort of writing can make a book ‘of its time’ – such as references to ‘Obama handouts’ (215) that now seem quaint. This said, it does help to deal squarely with the existential questions of more pondering novelists, who might either write apocalyptic fiction or give up the ghost entirely. McEwan also has the advantage of reputation and a readership that allows him to be less-than-perfect but still worth reading. I don’t think Solar is Ian McEwan’s best book, but it isn’t insubstantial either. I am going to have to find a substitute for the street library, as self-centred as that sounds. Like a consumer who would save the planet, but only after he has had his full. 

Geoffrey Gates