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Solar |  | Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
List Price: £18.99
Buy New: £9.30
as of 5/9/2010 05:21 CDT details
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Rating:  72 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0224090496
EAN: 9780224090490
Publication Date: March 18, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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Product Description
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 72
 Sharp-edged Solar Satire, Sacred and Profane March 22, 2010
Niall Alexander (Scotland)
94 out of 105 found this review helpful
Only a hundred pages into the latest novel from perhaps the greatest living British writer do you begin to grasp the conflict at the core of Solar. As with the vast majority of McEwan's fiction, the narrative turns on a single, earth-shattering event that rips out the rug from under its protagonist. In Solar, the game-changer occurs upon sometime Nobel laureate Michael Beard's return from a week observing first-hand the effects of climate change in the Arctic circle - which is to say, drinking copious quantities of wine and inventing amusing anecdotes to recount at a later date.
Eager for the comforts of hearth and home, Beard returns to London on an early flight only to find one of his research students in his luxurious apartment, naked but for Beard's own dressing gown. The philandering physicist isn't surprised to find his fifth - count 'em - wife with another man, but when Beard confronts the intruder, an already precarious situation develops into a farce of tragic proportions.
Beard is perhaps McEwan's most repellent protagonist to date, and considering the murderers, paedophiles and pimply teenagers who have narrated some of his previous tales, that's saying something. Beard is old, fat and full of himself; he eats, cheats and greets. He is "scalded by public disgrace... corrupted by a whiff of failure [and] consumed by his cranky affair with sunbeams". His inner monologue invariably borders on the unspeakable, by turns racist, lecherous and homophobic.
But Beard's greatest sin is surely his appetite - and I don't merely mean his enduring love for salt and vinegar crisps, though you get the sense that habit alone will see him in an early grave. From the outset, he consumes. He has consumed five wives, the latest of whom outright detests him. He consumes headlines, opinions, science, gossip. In fact, he has made his name in quantum physics by consuming and regurgitating Einstein for his hypothesis, the Beard-Einstein Conflation, earning the Nobel prize that is Beard's only real success by riding on the theoretical coattails of that scientist's breakthroughs. He is a compulsive consumer, and it's a credit to McEwan that Solar remains compelling in spite of its protagonist's unapologetic repugnance.
In large part, that's thanks to the black and brilliantly British sense of humour that pervades the narrative. From the discovery of "an ancient rasher of bacon doubling as a bookmark" between the pages of a valuable first edition to Beard's dreadful scheme to trick his fifth wife into thinking he is entertaining attractive company; and from a packet of salt and vinegar crisps shared (or not quite) on a train ride to an inconvenient call of nature during his weeklong expedition to the Arctic circle, there are frequent moments of dark slapstick more befitting The Mighty Boosh than the latest novel from the great nation's most esteemed author.
The humour is sharp-edged, of course; a fine satirical blade held tightly against the throat of a world procrastinating on its not-quite-fears of climate change. A long and wonderfully cutting lecture Beard gives midway through Solar forms the basis of McEwan's framing of the arguments for and against, but these concerns are not the crux of this novel: Solar doesn't preach in the fashion of Saturday. It is a character study at its heart, a startling triptych of the movements - both literal and metaphorical - of a physically and morally unpleasant man the whims of fate have placed in a position of power. In that, as in its every other purpose, Solar is a tremendous success.
Packed full of observations both sacred and profane and characters who will challenge your understanding of any number of issues, Solar is far from the dry tale of the end-times many feared it might be. Rather, McEwan's novel is an alarming parable of man and movement; the movements man should make, that is, set against those he selfishly does. Shocking, hilarious and unashamedly English, Solar will surely take its place alongside the very best of this breathtaking author's back-catalogue. Let it be said, Ian McEwan is a very clever monkey indeed.
Darkly Comic With A Touch of Menace March 18, 2010
Simon Savidge Reads (London, UK)
46 out of 54 found this review helpful
Thinking logically from the title and from one of the most talked about topics in the world at the moment you could guess that `Solar' could well be a book about global warming and you would be right. I have to admit I was slightly concerned that this might not make for an interesting read there's always the possibility of it coming across as preaching or you have to set the world far in the future to scare the hell out of everyone. In this case McEwan does neither, he sets the book over three period's in the last ten years and creates a lead character who is a reluctant saver of the planet until he see's the cash signs it could bring.
Michael Beard is the protagonist of McEwan's latest work. He's a Nobel Prize winning physicist (for the `Beard-Einstein Conflation') who as we meet him in 2000 has seen the best days of his career behind him along with the best days of his 5th marriage. In fact Beard isn't a particularly likeable character he is a philanderer of the highest order, lazy and only works now as head of the Government's new National Centre for Renewable Energy for the cash. McEwan does write these sort of leading characters rather well and cleverly the more odious, dislikeable and dark Beard becomes the more you want to read him or for some this could frustrate you so much you want to throw the book down in dismay. Ha!
So where is the global warming story? Well it intertwines with the tale of a man who is a failure at marriage, even the fifth time. As an escape from his wife, who after finding out about all his affairs has decided rather than to get gone to merely get even with their builder which of course makes Beard want her even more, Beard goes to the Arctic as part of his work to see what's happening there and the need for his company to find clean energy. However once there Beard does wonder `how can people who can't sort out a boot room ever save the planet'. Yet back in the UK someone may have found a highly scientific answer, someone who Beard comes back to find is the latest in a string of men to shack up with his wife. From then on through several plot twists and some dark detours the book takes us on to the future where Beard could possibly be the unlikeliest hero of the planet, I don't want to give any more away though, note the could which could go either way.
There is a lot of science in this book, in fact the book came to McEwan from his own trip to the Arctic in 2005, yet its digestible you know McEwan has done his research throughout and yet he doesn't show off and leave you lots after a sentence. I am not a science person and find it all confusing normally yet I got everything that was discussed. The book is also incredibly funny. I laughed and winced at a tale involving a call of nature and the affects of sub zero temperatures on the male apparatus there is also a darkly comical accidental death looming somewhere which will make you snigger even though it shouldn't. If people were worried that this book and its mix of science, some politics (Bush and Blair) and would be preachy or weirdly futuristic you needn't. This is a tale that makes even more of a point in its sudden conclusion because you have been laughing along the way.
Having given it five stars and having said all the above I am aware that McEwan can be an acquired taste (and I might be slightly swayed by having so far liked every book by McEwan I've read - apart from Saturday which I put down after a few pages, one for another day) so not everyone is going to like this book, possibly not even some of the McEwan fans as I have seen some scathing reviews in the press. This book isn't another Atonement by any stretch of the imagination but then it's not another Saturday either. I say judge for yourself. I really, really liked it personally.
Ultimate Folly April 3, 2010
Ian Caughlin (United Kingdom)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
McEwan is good at shocking us with seemingly arbitrary, least-expected acts of extreme violence. A reader's complacency is ruthlessly up-ended and the character subjected to some harrowing ordeal that - for sheer pointlessness and horror - far surpasses our most inventive nightmares. For some moments the dazed reader is unable to detach himself from this Other's misfortune and fails to appreciate that he is quite free from the lurid fate he has pictured so vividly. Suddenly shaking off the spell and realising his luck, he is vaulted into a euphoric mix of hilarity, self-congratulation and almost tearful relief. But in Solar the hilarity comes home to roost; for in Solar the next likely victim is the very Planet and all that it contains. - No joking-matter, this, then? There is something peculiarly sour about this parable-turned-comedy.
McEwan apparently threads into this latest novel a thesis concerning the phenomenon of storytelling more generally: its omnipresence as an embedded function of our very survival - even its (dubious) power to free us when truth becomes tyrannical! It is just such understandings that, as he goes about his work, inform the globe-trotting Michael Beard, scientist and Nobel Laureate; who, for his swansong, styles himself as chief mover and shaker in the race to save Humanity from accelerated global warming.
Achievements are not enough. Strings must be pulled; including heart-strings. High-fliers need to be savvy operators. Lobbyists soon come to believe their own spin. Only when the necessary mood-music of half-truths (even wholesale fictions) has been carefully lowered into place can plans be expedited and the world saved. (But, even then, if things go wrong, a saving narrative can usually be counted-on to put things right!)
The action of the novel spans fifteen years - give-or-take memory's spill-over from earlier days. For stretches of this we are shuttled between London residences and out-of-town workplaces. In addition, there are substantial foreign expeditions; with make-shift offices abutting onto outdoor installations still under construction. At one point, there's even a `key-note' Polar expedition.
Otherwise, we peer into matrimonial homes and clandestine love-nests - in one instance a mobile home; then, inevitably, there are the visits to that quintessential no-man's-land - the airport departure lounge: respite from the claims of propriety and from the proprietary claims of wives and mistresses! And there is a moving backdrop of hotel and motel rooms, wayside bars and restaurants - connected by the eerily straight highways that span nations and whole continents. Their anonymity encourages the corpulent Beard's taste for philandering. Even into late middle-age he is pleased to favour detachment over commitment (but without ever quite committing himself to this preference). Adrift in these non-places between genuine destinations, the exhausted, bibulous `saviour of the world' slips luxuriously into the warp of a sentimental, self-cosseting loneliness. It is here that he really feels at home. When not eyeing up junk food with peculiarly lustful, death-defying intent, our flabby hero's drink-muddled roving eye makes a defiant point of sizing up the unlikeliest of female prospects; and often at grossly inopportune moments.
And there is no end to the extravagance of these contrivances. Indeed, it could be guessed that such richness of incident would probably overstretch the powers of most other novelists.
As for the storyline and plot - not least, the book's somewhat all-encompassing theme yet singularly unsympathetic main character - is there more to this dark comedy than pointless cynicism? Any review which concentrated on a search for the novel's overarching structure - or hazarded a guess at its general meaning - could be in danger of missing something equally important: the sheer, time-based agility of this writer's craft; his ability to go with the flow of things; and, with grace and peculiar assurance, to articulate the texture and drift - and, yes, comedy - of his characters' passing thoughts and actions.
But the illusion of reality in the vividness of description is the least part of the drama we attend to here. It is the mark of true art that it vouchsafes something greater and more durable than illusions. Beyond mere `pretend-reporting' a novelist must come alongside the reader to unfold, articulate - and so, share - a quality and principle of attention so compelling that it opens up a protean sense of endless possibility. Coming up fresh from such an encounter, a reader may, indeed, feel ready to face and take on the world again!
To put it another way: imagine we observe some acrobat at work and then attempt to discuss what we've seen and report what has impressed us about the performance just witnessed. Particularly for a lay audience, extended comment might prove difficult. By contrast, if say, a book-club were to discuss a work of fiction the ideas (even for a lay-readership) might seem to flow quite effortlessly. Yet, what had most impressed us about a novel - or, for that matter, about the acrobat - might have been the aspect or quality of performance which seemed, above all, to elude or defy description. It would, of course, be difficult, anyway, for the retrospective, `summarising', view to capture the kinetic detail that had seemed so arresting at the time of reading. Accordingly, this is likely to receive a diminishing amount of attention - and perhaps much less than it deserves.
More than merely `discussing' the performance in question, McEwan's talent is such that he would be capable of actually doing, in prose, the very thing the acrobat had just done. We would not quite know how he had managed this; only that the challenge had been met satisfactorily. We would know beyond doubt that the task had been accomplished with grave, uncanny efficiency.
No acrobat is described in the pages of Solar and what is found can be found there alone; and, though any amount of follow-up discussion or construction-after-the-event may very well add to the interest and pleasure of reading, it remains just as true that discussion can never substitute the thing it seeks to comprehend.
At the centre of his own universe August 14, 2010
Philip Spires (La Nucia, Spain)
Usually - if such a word can be applied to rare events - Nobel Laureates are recognised towards the end of a lifetime's achievement. The true significance of work has to be established before it can be recognised. Michael Beard, modifier of Einstein's photovoltaics, producer of the Beard-Einstein Conflation, or should that have been the Einstein-Beard Conflation, seemed to receive his ultimate recognition a tad early in life. Surely it would have been the proposed grand application of his work that swayed the judges rather than the mere realisation of theory. So if there is to be a criticism of Ian McEwan's novel, Solar, it is precisely this. But then Michael Beard always was a precocious winner, after coming first in a beautiful baby award. So there.
This is my only criticism of Solar. I thought that Ian McEwan would never write anything to challenge the intensity, complexity, ease of expression and irony of Saturday. But Solar achieves all of this and much more.
In his professional life, Michael Beard is a scientist, a physicist with an interest in light. Energy becomes his focus and, via his photovoltaic conflation, he begins to address energy production for a warming planet. Or does he? Does he receive rather than initiate? And does he acknowledge?
Both meticulous and precise in his professional guise, Michael Beard is a sybaritic, lecherous slob in the private domain. We meet him first upon his fifth wife, Patrice. With her he has at last found happiness - at least when they are together. Periods apart find him pursuing anything available before or after a half a bottle of Scotch. Unknown to him, Patrice is doing precisely the same, but remaining sober. From Michael Beard's conventionally misogynist standpoint, this seems unfair and he calls foul.
Aldous is just the sort of bloke that - all things being equal (which of course they are not!) - Michael Beard would both ignore and avoid. He's big, hefty, wears sandals and a pony tail. His apparently laid back approach to life is surely anathema to Michael Beard's internally perceived order. After all, didn't a youthful Beard sport a jacket and tie with pens in the top pocket right through the 1960s? How times change, he might reflect, on pushing aside a pile of unwashed dishes mixed with general detritus in his London flat. But besides threatening, Aldous is also brilliant. He is a young post-doc recruited to assist Michael's research. And then there's Tarpin, a builder decidedly not of the same social class as the venerable academic. Things come together at the end of the book's first part. Suffice it to say that Michael Beard's involuntary circumcision at the hands of frost while taking a leak somewhere near Spitzbergen might just have been Mother Nature getting her own back, her feminist equaliser before the stronger opposition has even scored.
Unfortunately for Michael Beard, however, his tendency to spread himself too thinly provokes the termination of his Government-sponsored energy research. The director, Braby, sacks him, an act that injures pride. Michael internalises the rejection not as a failure but as an opportunity, given his multiple avenues of interest. How can it offend him? He's won a Nobel Prize. Can't he do precisely what he wants, even beyond criticism?
Beard is confronted with alternative views of both life and the universe. Everything follows. Later he is apparently committed to just one woman, Melissa, but without marriage, mutually-agreed. But he is constantly pulled elsewhere. His logical-positivist assumptions are questioned, both at home and abroad. People can lie, deconstruct, reconstruct. So can he. The only consistency in his personal life is its inconsistency, constantly inconsistent. But his professional assumptions are questioned by social constructivism, by phenomenological attack on the universality he assumes. The consequence is an irrational but wholly real reconstruction of a reality he thought he had both defined and described. His method of coping is enigmatic and inventive, but its public expression is totally uncontrolled, misconceived.
Michael's research points to a breakthrough in energy production. He can split water using sunlight and catalysts that promote artificial photosynthesis. He can truly harness the sun. Perhaps it vies for the centre of his universe. The results can burn carbon-free to power the world. His new daughter calls him a saviour. But his business brain shares his scientific nodes. He has patents. He hires Hammer to deal with detail, a task he accomplishes supremely until just before the scheduled switch on of the prototype in the New Mexico desert. The rest is history.
Solar presents a multiplicity of themes. But I think its main plank is an age-old conundrum. In an address presenting the Nobel Prize to Beard, a professor refers to Feynman's illustration of the elegance of Beard's Conflation. Tangled, knotted strings that dancers further complicate can, under the right conditions, with the right foresight, fall to a simple untangled simplicity with a single tug. Thus Beard had taken a knotted intellectual theory and let it fall free of its complications.
In his private life, however, Beard truly found complication. What was simple he knotted by quirk, by over-indulgence, by ill-discipline and by visceral opportunity. If the beautiful but independently-minded Melissa was temporarily unavailable across an ocean that provided the vacuum, then the fiftyish, flabby Darlene, a waitress in a New Mexico diner, provided the pressure. But she took her temporary role seriously, an attitude that Michael Beard never expected.
No matter how complicated our lives become, no matter how intertwined, no matter how independently we present identity, career, research or discovery, ultimately they all reduce to a simple cocktail of body fluids, desires - usually only partly fulfilled - and ultimately a resort to self-preservation, a fundamental state that can be obscured by our relentless pursuit of receding detail. Thus Ian McEwan presents a contrast between potentially enduring rationality that seeks out permanence and base, immediate desire driven by instincts we cannot even recognise, let alone control. At the last, it is illusory permanence that presents the true delusion. And what about constancy and the enduringly rational? Ask me tomorrow.
A black farce about solar science July 9, 2010
Dr Rob
A very clever, black comedy written the fine, highly recognisable style of Ian McEwan. The central character, Michael Beard, has no redeeming features - someone who suceeds at the highest level of science by cheating, plagiarism. bullying, masogeny and a whole host of other unpleasant characteristics. Regrettably these people really do exist - but hopefully as in this story - they get their "Come-uppence" in the end". Certainly the tale, if you are male, will make you think twice about taking a pee in the artic in the future!
The scientific background is that of newable energy - mainly as suggested in the title, solar power. So far as I could tell it was accurate concerning the science at the time of writing. The book will make you want to see more of your family and eat a proper varied diet!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 72
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