Solar
by Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape
(NZ publication 19 March - $38.99)

The Sunday Times review by Peter Kemp

Ian McEwan’s new novel — a comedy every bit as brilliant as its title might suggest — takes readers into the mind of a Nobel prize-winning physicist. Readers should immediately be reassured, though, that this isn’t a painful experience. Michael Beard, short, fat, bald and 53 years old when the story starts, hasn’t done any cutting-edge thinking about science for decades.

Since a remarkable youthful breakthrough when his pioneering contribution to quantum theory, the Beard-Einstein Conflation, won him a Nobel laureateship, he has coasted, resting on his laurels. Scientific sinecures, remunerative media appearances and lavish jaunts to international conventions have kept him in comfort. Now more bureaucrat than scientist, he heads a research establishment, the Centre for Renewable Energy, set up by a government eager to advertise its resolve to combat climate change.

When we first meet Beard, in 2000, his fifth marriage has just hit the rocks, his 11th affair having proved the last straw to his current wife who, in retaliation, has taken up with a builder recently working on their house. Scenes of sardonic comedy chart Beard’s fraught responses to this and his growing exasperation with the nerdy zeal of young physicists working for him at the centre. To escape these irritants, he accepts an invitation to visit the Arctic with a group of artists and scientists concerned with global warming — a phenomenon about which at this point he is privately sceptical.

The ensuing interlude in and around a luxuriously appointed boat in a fjord blends farce and finesse. Mishaps to Beard’s genitals amid the subzero rigours of the environment, and other bodily fiascos, are retailed with near-slapstick gusto. Irony flickers over the ecowarriors spewing noxious emissions from their vehicles as they tour the pristine snowscapes they are keen to protect (carbon footprints imposed by the trip are to be “offset by planting 3,000 trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed”). Well-intentioned artworks they create — “sentinel” snowmen and ice sculptures of polar bears — are wryly surveyed.
The full review at The Times online.

And from The Observer - Ian McEwant explains to Nicholas Wroe why he's chosen to grapple with climate change in his new book, Solar