It's Only a Movie
By Mark Kermode
Random House, $38.99
Reviewed by Mark Broatch

Mark Kermode, for those who don't know, is the usually entertaining, always certain and occasionally ranting film critic for BBC Radio Five Live. As his many NZ fans know, he shares his cinematic pulpit with the host, Simon Mayo, as he has done in various programme incarnations, for over a decade. They bicker like an old couple, about Mark's pomaded quiff, his surprisingly large hands, his affection for Basic Instinct 2.

(Pic right - Mark Kermode photographed outside his favourite cinema, the Phoenix in East Finchley, London. Photograph: Suki Dhanda)

But he's a serious critic, in that he devotes much time on air to explaining why he likes or loathes a film, has a real PhD, and has written proper books. And he reviews all genres, from dogme to shaggy dog tales to doggone awful. And I enjoy his reviews - podcast but some are also on YouTube - because he's right 98% of the time, and even when he's not right he is either persuasive or amusing in the attempt. He's deluded in thinking that The Exorcist is the best film of all time, of course, or that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is actually watchable, let alone good. Otherwise, he's pretty much on the money. Jaws is better than Schindler's List, Mamma Mia was so bad it was good.

The good thing about It's Only a Movie - its central conceit is deciding, if Kermode's life were a film, who would play him and his friends - is that it's just like his radio show: opinions, anecdotes, digressions. It begins with director Werner Herzog being shot at while Kermode was interviewing him, through his Marxist university days, into his "shambles" of an early career, to today: radio, TV and print/web star being handbagged by Helen Mirren. I did laugh out loud three times. The bad thing is that he probably over-shares. I didn't quite need to know so much about Piranha Women or some of his personal predicaments. A few more commas and slightly sharper editing would have made his energetic prose a bit less breathless. And the cover made the normally besuited Kermode look like a Southern redneck lumberjack with his chainsaw. He's still the best "woolly-headed English halfwit" critic around.

SOLAR
By Ian McEwan
Johnathan Cape/Random House, $38.99
Reviewed by Mark Broatch

Michael Beard is short, fat, balding and almost pathologically solipsistic, yet he manages somehow to succeed at being an unapologetic womaniser. Perhaps, it is suggested, it's because he's eloquent and clever  a physicist with a Nobel Prize, even if his best work seems to be behind him, and they believe him in need of rescue.
 When his fifth wife, Patrice, a beautiful primary school teacher, has an open affair, he finds himself unaccountably and inconveniently humiliated and longing for her. Ian McEwan's real genius lies in making this deluded, overindulging creep sufficiently engaging that we continue to read to p283 without wanting to throttle him or chuck the book in dismay.

Beard becomes head of a renewable energy institute that narrows in on building the best household wind generator. The first half of the book happens in 2000, so  the backdrop is the Bush-Gore election, particularly the eco-free market split that implies. But events transpire  which some will see coming  that upturn Beard's personal and professional lives. A crime is committed, and the wrong person  or is it?  gets the blame. That moment and a trip to the ice set off Beard, a dedicatedly apolitical man, towards becoming a climate change champion and with a new alternative-energy goal: artificial photosynthesis. His 2009 enthusiasm is channelled into talking to potential investors and a site in  New Mexico, less so into his new partner, the calm, shrewd, feminine Melissa, who desperately wants a child before her clock ticks 40.

If Solar was a film, Beard would be in just about every scene, so he not only has to be tolerable, but believable. Is he? It is not clear if he is a totally self-deceiving and undependable observer. Even when we recognise McEwan's set-pieces, say, a speech to investors or a tussle over a packet of salt and vinegar potato chips on the train, the author overlays and undercuts, yet without lessening their impact or authenticity. When I read the potato chips scene, for example, it seemed awfully familiar, and when Beard repeats it as an anecdote later, it's pointed out by a member of the audience that it has more than a whiff of an urban myth. Did it happen as Beard imagined it, did his mind unconsciously embellish, or did it happen at all? That suspension of  Leg 3sureness allows McEwan - when he's not laying out the science of climate change and subatomic physics - to explore the places in men's heads where they go to avoid the truth, while Beard's general state lets him delve into the physical distaste that we all experience from time to time as we age and overindulge. Beard's lack of children and relentless philandering come with psychological explanations of sorts, but they are left merely as possibilities, reasons or excuses that the reader  or Beard  may grab hold of should they wish. 

As usual with McEwan, our conviction comes by way of his peerless storytelling, his complete control of language. But in Solar McEwan loosens up enough to allow himself some drollery. This being climate change, site of a thousand arguments in which no one ever listens, no one comes out without a little oil on their face: warming alarmists, warming deniers, hobbyist lunatics, arts students, post-docs. A smart and satisfying read.

Footnote:

Author/journalist/wordsmith Mark Broatch wrote the above reviews which were first published in the Sunday Star Times, 14 March, 2010.
The Bookman warmly recommends Mark's book, In a Word, (New Holland).
My copy is right here on my desk and is frequently consulted.