A cosmic comedy
The Spectator, Wednesday, 10th March 2010
Sam Leith

SOLAR
Ian McEwan
Cape, 304pp

Not long ago I had an email from a friend, wondering if I’d yet read the new Ian McEwan. ‘Talk about a bolt from the blue,’ she said. ‘McEwan does slapstick. I never saw that coming.’ She added (unfairly, I thought) that you might class On Chesil Beach as slapstick of an unintentional sort, but her point holds. Here, in a book around a scientific theme of considerable seriousness — global warming and renewable energy — McEwan has written the closest thing he’s ever done to a farce.
Told in three chunks, spaced at intervals between 2000 and 2009, Solar is the story of a Nobel-prize-winning physicist on a slow slide to disaster. As a young man, Michael Beard won the Nobel Prize for a discovery about the interaction between matter and light called the Beard-Einstein Conflation. That hyphen — at once linking his name to Einstein and marking him as an appendage to a greater man — is tormenting.

Now Beard is short and stocky and his hair is thinning. He is coasting on his reputation; he sits on boards and lends the glow of the Swedish Academy to letterheads. Currently, he’s running a centre where they’re trying to design a wind-turbine for domestic use.
But he is no longer on the cutting edge, and the enthusiasms of his geeky assistants are an irritant rather than an inspiration. Front and centre in his mind is not physics but the fact that his young and beautiful fifth wife is quite openly schtupping the builder. And despite his own heroic history of infidelities, Beard minds very much about this.

At first, McEwan seems to be in Philip Roth territory. As the slapstick thickens — and Bear observes himself, with droll detachment, being driven demented by his wife’s infidelity — he seems to be in dialogue with Howard Jacobson or Kingsley Amis. Then, in creeps Tom Sharpe. And by the time an alfresco pee-stop in the Arctic circle (Beard’s on a global-warming-related freebie) causes our hero’s penis to freeze to his metal zip, Ian McEwan seems to be channelling the Farrelly brothers.

The plot twists off with some very McEwanish elements, though: a nerdy young man, an unexpected death, an intensely imagined moment of madness. It moves on and out until the Beard of the third act is on the verge of what should be a triumph.

He has patented a system, modelled on photosynthesis, for making clean energy from sunlight, and is about to unveil a full-scale trial in the New Mexico desert. He’s quietly anticipating being hailed as the man who saved the planet — and becoming very rich into the bargain. But then his solar panels fall into shadow, for the sky is dark with chickens coming home to roost.

Read the full review at The Spectator online. Or buy The Spectator dated 10 March, or The Spectator Australia dated 13 March which is where I read it.There are 10 pages of thoughtful book reviews in the magazine by the way, that is impressive.