Global warming novel burns with wit, energy

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Children walk past the dried-up bed of the Jialing River in China where drought in 2006 left millions short of water.

Solar

By Ian McEwan

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Author Ian McEwan sets his satiric sights on human indifference to global warming. (CP)

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Knopf Canada, 285 pages, $32

This gleeful satire of human indifference to the threat of global warming might not be Ian McEwan's best novel, but it's probably his funniest. And maybe his blackest.

It boasts all the strengths we've come to appreciate from the brainy British master -- his brisk pacing and clever plotting, his grasp of scientific matters and his understanding of the centrality of work, not to mention his air-tight sentences and bravura set pieces.

But the humour, which at time borders on farcical, comes as a surprise, especially after two big serious books, Atonement and Saturday, and one slender serious one, On Chesil Beach.

Not since Amsterdam, a slight comedy of manners which won him the Booker Prize in 1998, has McEwan displayed such a comic touch.

His protagonist, Michael Beard, is a middle-aged physicist, "bald, short, fat, clever," who has been resting on his laurels since he won the Nobel Prize for work he did in his early 20s.

"Vaguely weary of himself, bereft of alternatives," Beard lends his name to others' initiatives, attends conferences, eats and drinks with abandon -- chubby from childhood, he gains 65 pounds over the course of the novel's 10 years -- and preys on any woman who will accept his dinner invitations.

Beard calls to mind an epicurean version of some of Philip Roth's cynical sad sacks. When we meet him, he is childless and his fifth marriage is breaking up.

His wife has been having an affair with a loutish builder, "the man who repointed their house," but even Beard can't hold this against her, since he has had a Tiger Woodsian 11 affairs in five years.

Beard's inability to control his appetites defines his character (or lack of it). McEwan clearly intends him to personify the Earth itself, or at least its human inhabitants who cannot wean themselves from their obscene habits, despite their period resolutions at confabs like Kyoto and Copenhagen.

Though Beard himself doubts global warming, sees it as "another beast" conjured up by Christian civilization's "apocalyptic tendency," he has been serving as director of a government wind-turbine project, a plan he believes is flawed.

The freak death of an idealistic young colleague, under farcical and adulterous circumstances, provides him the opportunity to steal the man's ideas. He reinvents himself as a proponent of "artificial photosynthesis," a new technology he touts as solving the planet's energy problems.

The protagonist of McEwan's 1997 novel, Enduring Love, is a science journalist. In Saturday (2003), Henry Perowne is a brain surgeon.

In both those outings McEwan depicts men who breathe the cool air of rationalism and science. (He has long been a public atheist with his famous friends Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie.) In Solar, he does it again, flaunting such complex topics as quantum mechanics and photovoltaics with the cerebral aplomb of a Richard Powers or the late David Foster Wallace.

But he saves his most passionate descriptions for Beard's true loves: alcohol, food and sex. Early on he constructs a hilarious set piece, where after a night's drinking, Beard forgets to go the bathroom before heading out to a conference aboard an Arctic icebreaker to "witness global warming for himself."

Riding a snowmobile to the ship, he must stop to relieve himself. In the process, he freezes his most precious member and fears it has fallen off inside his parka.

"He wondered for the first time in his adult life whether there may be purposeful design in human lives, and entities like Greek gods, imposing ironies, extracting revenge, imposing their rough justice."

McEwan divides his timeline into three sections. The first is set in 2000, when he sets the plot in motion, the second in 2005, when Beard promotes his new idea and meets a paramour who wants his child, and the third in 2009, where all his chickens come home to roost.

In this section he travels to the U.S. southwest, where under the baking sun, McEwan gives concrete form to the novel's title.

Solar is not perfect. It is hard to accept that Beard, given his unpleasant ways, could be so "unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women."

In one set piece, Beard angers feminists with an off-handed comment about the difference between male and female brains. But because this lapse does not come back to haunt him, one wonders why it's there.

Worse, the ending disappoints. Without giving too much away, one thinks of gangster Tony Soprano's fate in his TV series' final episode.

But even with its imperfections, Solar burns with wit and energy. It demonstrates why McEwan is among the language's most popular literary novelists.

Arts columnist Morley Walker edits the Free Press books section.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 13, 2010 H10