Ian McEwan is widely considered to be a ‘national treasure’. He is a literary heavyweight whose meticulous research and plot designs deliver novels that capture the zeitgeist of an age and also entertain. His latest offering, ‘Solar’ published by Jonathan Cape, is no exception. It is a reflection on the latest calamity plaguing mankind – climate change and global warming that threatens the very existence of the planet. It is also a sly, satirical portrayal of the greedy world of science and commerce, colliding and conspiring in a desperate attempt to control resources and finances.
Large tracts of the novel feel like a crash course in postgraduate physics, but this is far from being merely an expose of the rarefied, boffin world of Science. McEwan also uses the book as a platform to air his own authorial musings on subjects as diverse as class divisions, the self-indulgence of art versus the rigours of science, well-meaning idealism versus cold-nosed capitalism and more poignantly the vicissitudes of old age and physical decline.
The novel is told from the viewpoint of Michael Beard who belongs to the tribe of men who are, ‘bald, short, fat, clever…unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women.’ A sometime Nobel Prize winner, who has lost the early spark of his youth and is muddling his way through a middle age that is littered with ex-wives, murders and serial philandering. But this same Michael Beard is adept at survival. He is shrewdly aware of his own intellectual limitations and possesses both the nerve and audacity to turn these very limitations to his advantage. In this he is like a magpie, picking his way through nuggets of knowledge brought to him by unsuspecting colleagues and trusting subordinates and turning them into something uniquely his own.
Beard is no austere scientist, locked within his own grey cells, he is very much a creature of flesh and the most entertaining bits of the novel are precisely when McEwan lovingly illustrates his central protagonist’s striking physicality. For most of the novel, Beard is in thrall to his appetites, both carnal and gluttonous. The novel is an unashamed paean to the glories of the flesh – the more magnified, the better. At times in fact – Michael and his various coupling partners resemble the outsized figures of a Botero sculpture.
While this is an intelligent farce, with McEwan at his satirical best, the novel disappoints in chartering the emotional trajectories of the main character. Michael Beard is self-aware but has no self-knowledge. He drifts from one misadventure to another without a capacity for growth or eliciting any sympathy from the reader. Moreover, the satellite cast of characters who orbit his planet – the five ex-wives and the numerous girlfriends and business partners, seem caricatures and types who exist as authorial vehicles to drum home certain obvious truths. At nearly three hundred pages, this is an amusing and educational read but the plot, with its rather contrived and speedy dénouement at the end may not please the more exigent readers.
Ian McEwan will be appearing at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music on Monday, 22nd March 2010 at 6.30 pm.