Solar

Ian McEwan

Having won a Nobel Prize for physics early in his career Beard can only find “excitement and unpredictability” in his private life, as professionally he has been enervated by sinecures and a treadmill of corporate junkets.

Short, bald and possessed of “a concertina of chins“, he has managed to clock up five marriages by his early 50s. The latest one is floundering as Patrice, his beautiful young wife, responds to his inveterate philandering by carrying on her own affair with their oafish builder.

The insolence of it is enough to send Beard into a tailspin, as he becomes consumed with jealousy, which manifests itself in physical malaise and the lame, unsuccessful counter-attacks of a cuckold. She, on the other hand, keeps him at a distance with “lethal cheerfulness”.

Salvation – or rather distraction – comes for him through intellectual pursuit, as his interest in science is reignited by a consuming passion to resolve the dread fear of our age – catastrophic climate change which, of course, is the root of the novel’s title.

“These days,” recounts the narrator at one stage as Beard is airborne, “whenever he came in over a big city he felt the same unease and fascination. The giant concrete wounds dressed with steel, these catheters of ceaseless traffic filing to and from the horizon – the remains of the natural world could only shrink before them. The pressure of numbers, the abundance of inventions, the blind forces of desires and needs looked unstoppable and were generating a heat, a modern kind of heat that had become, by clever shifts, his subject, his profession. The hot breath of civilisation. He felt it, everyone was feeling it, on the neck, in the face.”

Beard cottons on to a plan – by intellectual property theft – to mass-produce energy by artificial photosynthesis, which causes him to flit between his native London and New Mexico, the site of his revolutionary prototyped power station. As his confidence is restored, so are his errant social ways. Women continue to topple before him, blind to the reality that he is “a monster of insincerity“; invariably caught up in the belief that he’s a “genius in need of rescuing”.

Beard, a wonderful study in the self-centred ways of many talented men, often extricates himself from relationships by mere inaction; the easy course of much of his life is accounted for by a simple principle: “The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.”

There is a jaunty pace to Solar. In writing a comic novel, McEwan displays some courage. At times, the story has the narrative arc and the lowbrow, preposterous humour of a Tom Sharpe book. The dapper Beard’s late-on infatuation with a 51-year-old, gum-chewing waitress who lives in a trailer is particularly incredible.

But time after time it soars with the most provocative meditations – on quantum physics, politics, punctuality and human imperfection: “Among all the yearning rationales for the godhead, the argument from design collapsed with homo sapiens. No god worth his salt could be so careless at the workbench.”