Solar, by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, $32.95.
I’m an McEwan tragic, I admit. So, I thought, if anyone was going to pull off the coup of turning the subject of climate change into a compelling novel, it was surely the master.
Rather than lecture, he’s given us a black comedy –a farce, almost – centred around the monstrous character of Michael Beard: a fat, greedy, amoral, self-centred, philandering scientist who won a Nobel Prize during his brilliant youth and has been trading on it ever since. Repellent but cunning, he sniffs the zeitgeist and pinches a colleague’s work to become the front man for renewable energy, specifically converting the sun’s rays into hydrogen and so, potentially, saving our carbon-choked world – and salvaging his collapsing fifth marriage while he’s at it. But nothing goes quite right for Michael Beard, whose appetites and ambitions come to represent all of us who want to do the right thing for the planet, yet avoid a single personal sacrifice. It’s a virtuoso performance by McEwan, combining some brilliant set-pieces with a deep knowledge of the field, but a book in his Saturday rather than Atonement mode. Feeding the brain and funny-bone rather than the heart.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
