SOLAR
By IAN McEWAN
Jonathan Cape, 2010, 285 pages, $27.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Michael Beard, a 53 year old physicist with a Nobel prize for his work on the ‘Beard-Einstein Conflation’ in quantum physics, is past his prime. Overweight, in his fifth failed marriage, his career stalling, he is also out of sympathy with the scientific momentum on global warming - he finds all the earnest talk of the ‘planet in peril’ too ‘Old Testament’.
But, as Ian McEwan writes in his latest novel, Solar, redemption may be at hand through the work of one of the enthusiastic post-doctoral advocates of artificial solar photosynthesis at the National Centre for Renewable Energy which Beard heads. Alas, things start to go wrong – the project hits economic, technical and intellectual property snags, and it is buffeted by the resurgence of global warming denialism.
Beard’s failed romantic past also returns to haunt him in the form of an obsessive, delusional house-builder who had been having an affair with Beard’s wife and has since been released from prison where he had been stewing for eight years after being framed by Beard to avoid Beard being presumed guilty for the death of the solar-impassioned post-doc who had also been having an affair with Beard’s wife but who had accidentally slipped on a polar bear skin rug and died from a head injury during a confrontation with Beard.
Will the builder extract revenge? Will true love finally find a way for Michael Beard? Will Beard’s company, Concentrated Solar Power, conquer the renewables market and save the planet? Who cares - alas, this is the answer, for this first novel to take global warming as its theme, by a major Booker-winning British author, is as noxious as a dirty coal-fired power station.
Although it is a page-turner, the motivation is more to discover what literary oil-slicks the coming pages hold. Plot implausibilities. Clumping, wooden dialogue. The science content clumsily grafted onto the love (or, more often, soap opera) interest (caught in the post-coital act of infidelity with Beard’s wife, the solar-impassioned post-doc launches into a highly improbable disquisition on quantum coherence in photosynthesis).
The science rarely rises above tick-boxing of exotic lists (superstrings, hetrotic strings, M-theory, the ‘delightful intricacies of calabi-Yau manifolds and orbifolds’), stilted exposition of quantum theory and one stale joke (the string theorist caught in bed with another woman who exclaims to his wife, ‘Darling, I can explain everything!’).
Politically, the quality is no better. Beard publicly airs his views that women’s brains do not fit them as well as men’s brains for engineering and physics, provoking protests which McEwan dismissively lampoons as a witch-hunt by ‘politically-correct’ ideologues. Fanned by McEwan, the aroma of burning martyr is strong. So, to match the ‘Beard-Einstein Conflation’ we now have what could be termed the ‘Beard-McEwan Conflation’ which conflates feminism with ‘political correctness’ and postmodernism in a defence of biological determinism.
The environmental politics are also abysmal. McEwan’s sympathies are with carbon trading schemes and other market ‘solutions’ to global warming, which are claimed to not only solve the environmental problem but, as Beard enthuses, make “very large sums of money, staggering sums” for their entrepreneurs. In the end, Beard, and his creator, settle comfortably on nuclear energy as the fall-back solution. “Was not the 28-kilometre exclusion zone around Chernobyl now the biologically richest and most diverse region of Central Europe”, concludes Beard in a bold brief for the advantages of nuclear radiation. Perhaps McEwan meant all this as satire but it isn’t obvious, nor particularly well done.