Ever since Black Dogs, I have found the books where McEwan tackles Themes Of Recent Significance especially his Iraq demonstration novel, Sat. his most forced and febrile.

The lead figure in query is Michael Beard, Nobel Prize winner for the Beard-Einstein Conflation, a bit of genius that has authorized his career to coast.

Beard is a scumbag, glutton, alcoholic, serial adulterer and egomaniac ; a sort of self-loathing Falstaff with a physics degree. As the novel opens, his 5th spouse has an affair with a coarse builder and he has got an honorary and useless role in the “National Centre for Replaceable Energy”, since he’s “not unconditionally distrustful about climate change”.

However , he sweats indifference at the ideas of an idealistic student who believes the Einstein-Beard Conflation may hold the key to “artificial photosynthesis” a clean, efficient way to harness daylight. The 1st section welds together conjugal collapse ( done with some verve ), a crime plot ( done with ham fists ) and a meeting in the Arctic. It’s truly funny, with pointed satires on the varied artists and ecologists accompanying Beard, a polar bear, and an insufferable scene where he suspects his frostbitten dick has fallen off.

McEwan even ridicules his very own endeavour, as the artists enthuse that “it was art in its highest forms, poetry, sculpture, dance, abstract music, conceptual art, that would lift climate change as a subject, gild it, palpate it, exhibit all of the horror and lost beauty and grand threat, and induce the public to take thought”. The novel jumps from 2k, to 2005, to the present day. Beard has new ladies, a crisp obsession, is party to a miscarriage of justice and becomes a successful counsel for synthetic photosynthesis thru brazen copying.

Again, there are well done set pieces with Beard as the swollen, boastful thread connecting them. McEwan has related Solar isn’t a comedy, but a “novel with extended comic stretches”, and the comedy definitely stretches in the curtain call.

As all of the parts of Beard’s life come together on the launch of his synthetic photosynthesis, the plotting gets inelegantly overheated : more Young Ones than Yes Minister. Sometimes McEwan appears to be attempting to channel the young McEwan, that master of the cold bizarre. But the disgust is overplayed : eating too many salmon sandwiches before a talk, Beard feels “an oily queasiness at something monstrous and rotten from the sea, stranded on the tidal mud lofts of a stagnant estuary, disintegrating gaseously in his tum and welling up, tarnished his breath”. Later he’s disappointed not to find “the chocolate arabesque of another man’s excrement” in the john as he tries ( on a new occasion ) to barf. But the basic problem if this is a story about global warming is that Beard is too depraved, too flabbily defective to hold the theme. He compromises it, in a way that, had he been a sceptic, or a falsifier of info, would have still authorized the speechifying and polemic to stand.