An Ian McEwan novel doesn?t shock anymore. But his turn at comedy, in his 11th, sometimes verging on black and sometimes on slapstick, comes as a surprise.
The hype around Solar had been building up ever since it was announced months ago that it would be a global theme book?on climate change?like Saturday (2005), which grappled with the aftermath of 9/11 and the protests against the war on Iraq through the eyes of a London neuro-surgeon. But Solar and Saturday are chalk and cheese, and McEwan seems to be having a lot of fun by placing an anti-hero, a man of surfeit, at the centre of his climate change argument, and the clash that ensues.
McEwan?s early novels pushed boundaries, going where few dare to tread, often taking readers to the edge and back with its themes of violence, incest, paedophilia, abuse.
In Cement Garden (1978), four orphans bury their mother in the basement and carry on as if nothing happened to avoid being taken into foster care; in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), a tourist couple is brutally murdered in Venice in a drug haze; in The Child in Time (1987) a father agonises over a child who goes missing. It was only after Enduring Love (1997) that McEwan began taking on big-themes. Think Atonement, straddling continents and generations, and Saturday. But Solar is his biggest yet, and his satirical look at the world?s big obsession?climate change?will resonate.
In Solar, his Nobel-winning physicist Michael Beard is the antithesis of Saturday?s Henry Perowne. Beard is 53, struggling with his fifth marriage? ?Had he honestly thought that status was enough, that his Nobel Prize would keep her in his bed???and has a measure of meanness difficult to believe in a man of science or any human being for that matter. ?He belonged to that class of men?vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever ?who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women,? McEwan introduces Beard. Through the pages, we find him manipulating his way through talks, lending his name to anyone willing to pay and reluctantly heading a government-backed project to tackle global warming. When Beard takes a trip to the Arctic Circle with fellow scientists and artists, some hilarious, darkly comic events follow. When the group, keen to study the impact of climate change on the world, can?t give up its selfish ways in the ship?s boot room, where the arctic gear is stored, you understand what McEwan is getting at.
Are these the right people to save us from climate disasters? Perhaps too pat, but Beard, albeit McEwan, concludes: ?How were they to save the earth, when it was so much larger than the boot room?? Beard who gets flabbier by the pages?he is always munching crisps or nuts, and eating loads of ice cream?then becomes a metaphor for the people at large, if we don?t take control of our excesses, we will die.
Next, when the personal and the professional collide, in his living room, the mean professor, stumbles on the answer to save the earth: he suggests artificial photosynthesis to get access to cheaper, cleaner power. Of course, it?s not his idea, but isn?t the world too full of such people, living on borrowed ideas? A crime?s committed in the process, and Beard should be punished, right? Well, this is a McEwan novel and there are no easy answers.