Global warming farce

Ian McEwan’s Solar is a climate crisis
that may leave you feeling cold

by JULIET WATERS

Last year, I discovered my review of Amsterdam listed as recommended criticism on Ian McEwan’s official website. I was surprised because it was a fairly negative review of his only book to receive a Booker Prize. My guess is that they posted it because, in an interview the year before, I’d learned something interesting about McEwan’s writing process.

McEwan had told me that every time he finishes a major novel, he usually unwinds with some screenplay writing. Hollywood politics, however, had shelved the sequel he’d written to David Cronenberg’s The Fly before McEwan started working on Enduring Love. Because he was still officially “sulking,” he’d decided to write a shorter more “lighthearted” novel, a “tribute to Evelyn Waugh” that was obviously Amsterdam.

My latest visit to Ianmcewan.com reveals that he’s still following this pattern, more or less. His last major novel was On Chesil Beach in 2007. But this time, instead of a screenplay, he wrote the libretto to the opera For You. I’m guessing that this may still have left him with some substantial unwinding to do. And so we have the strange hybrid of satire and science that is his new novel, Solar.

Recent interviews with McEwan in the British media indicate that he’s preparing himself for a polarized reaction to this book, and early reviews suggest he’s right to do this. Some are so positive that, with the right jury, he may very well win another Booker. Others are more confused and put off by this surprisingly broad black comedy anchored in what is, arguably, the most serious issue of our time: global warming.

The novel starts in the year 2000 and follows the interior thoughts of Michael Beard, a repellent, narcissistic, Nobel-winning physicist. He’s internationally known for his “Beard-Einstein Conflation” on photovoltaics and heads a British climate change laboratory, on paper. But his personal life is a mid-life crisis cliché. Beard has always been a serial philanderer. Now he’s just lost his fifth wife to a builder. It’s been about 20 years since Beard has had any real curiosity or scientific vision and he doesn’t believe, or perhaps, more accurately, care about global warming.

The first 70 pages of Solar mainly concern Beard’s bleak ruminations on his failed personal life, and his over-rewarded professional life. Most days, he’s driven around in a prototype Prius by a young scientist who irritates Beard to no end with his global warming paranoia and his incessantly chirpy belief that the Beard-Einstein Conflation can be used to save the world. Meanwhile, we are entertained with a schadenfreud subtext that suggests only harm can come to someone as soul-less and undeserving of his good fortune as this obese, unattractive, nasty little man.

And sure enough, harm arrives. First in a farcical scene where Beard visits the Arctic and tries to take an outdoor piss in minus 35 degree weather, a situation which results in one of the most sadistic extended penis torture jokes I hope I’ll ever read. (Finally, 30 years later, McEwan gets to recycle the severed penis they banned on the BBC in his 1979 TV play, Solid Geometry.) Then in a plot twist that brings to mind Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, Beard is set on an ill-fated course of murder, scandal and intellectual fraud.

In the end whether you enjoy this book is probably going to come down to where your sense of humour lies in the spectrum of misanthropic to philosophical. If you believe that the solution to global warming is mostly a matter of the right people developing the right energy technology at the right time, then you may find this a deliciously mean story with a satisfying ending. If you believe that technology will probably be ineffectual without a massive shift in the values at the heart of our civilization, the dark, if entertaining, energy that fuels Solar may still leave you feeling a little cold.

SOLAR BY IAN MCEWAN, KNOPF, HC,
$283 PP., $32