Solar by Ian McEwan

Solar by Ian McEwan
Buy Solar by Ian McEwan at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Literary Fiction
Reviewer: Robin Leggett
Summary: Very different from the author's previous works, taking a comic look at the serious and topical issue of global warming. While fans of McEwan may be disappointed at the different style, it's still a very entertaining read with a gloriously obnoxious central character.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 304	Date: March 2011
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 978-0099549024
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Ian McEwan's Michael Beard is possibly the most ignoble Nobel prize winner there has ever been. He's gloriously obnoxious and hateful in almost every way. Since winning his Nobel prize he has rested on his Nobel laurels and has traded on his reputation rather than his achievements in his specialist area of physics. When this book starts, he's on his fifth wife having managed to wreck all previous marriages by his compulsive infidelity. He's short, balding, ageing, obese, bigoted, and something of an opportunist, particularly if it means he can be lazy and get away with something. In short, which he is, he's morally vacant. But what makes Beard an effective creation, and what carries us along with him despite his obnoxiousness, is that he knows all these things about himself. He's rather like Shakespeare's Richard III - he's honest with the reader and himself about what he is doing. Sure he would like to change, but talking about it isn't doing it, is it?

And here is where the personal character links merge with the general themes of the story. Climate change. At least in one reading of this book, Beard's approach to his own well-being (particularly his ballooning weight) is similar to the West's approach to global warming - lots of talk, but depressingly little action.

It's not so much a book about climate change per se. Sure, Beard ends up working on a solar solution to the energy crisis - only because he's managed to acquire someone else's ideas of course - but along the way there are swipes at science, global warming itself, the press and political correctness. McEwan has mastered the comic art of taking arguments to the edge of reason and fractionally beyond to make them funny, without going too far into the absurd. There's a grain of truth in much of what comes out of Beard's mouth - as more than a grain of food passes in the opposite direction.

Many have called this a comic book - I'm not so sure. Yes, it has some highly comic scenes, and some bordering on farce, but it's more of a serious book that has plenty of funny passages. It is a terrific character study of a thoroughly nasty, lecherous, self-centred, obnoxious man, with plenty of dark humour and satire thrown in.

For me, it certainly doesn't eclipse McEwan's earlier work, but it's characteristically well written, highly readable, and thought provoking - not bad for a book labelled as a comic work. It's very different from his other books though, so fans of his work who come with pre-conceived expectations, beware.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.

The obvious further reading to is to suggest other books by this author (Enduring Love by Ian McEwan is my personal favourite) but in this case you might find more similarity with books such as The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe.

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