Solar, Ian McEwan Review

Climate change is, of course, the issue of the twenty-first century, and McEwan is not a novelist to shy away from the zeitgeist, having already written about child abduction, voluntary euthanasia and the Iraq war, those bête noires of our times.

The problem with writing a novel about climate change is the preachiness that surrounds the topic. In an era when the author is no longer regarded as a propagandist, let alone a moral authority, the merest suggestion of didacticism is guaranteed to send chills down the spine of any intelligent writer. So McEwan has done a really interesting thing: he’s made it a comedy. A comedy about climate change. Enter Michael Beard...

Beard is a Nobel Prize winning physicist and head of a climate change think tank. He is also, in every sense of the word, one of the grossest protagonists in English literature – his moral repugnance matched, in a manner fitting a Dickensian novel, by his physical grotesqueness. I somehow suspect that this will be one McEwan’s novel very difficult to give the Hollywood treatment.

Beard’s swelling belly and proliferating chins are documented with relish, his corpus provides much of the physical humour of the story, as well as being an obvious manifestation of his physical and metaphysical greed. Yet he manages to keep our attention, if not our sympathy, for 283 pages.

Perhaps, in our greedy, selfish and wasteful age, we suit a greedy, selfish and wasteful hero. The wonderful thing about Beard, and about this book, is that they seem to achieve greatness in spite of themselves. Beard plagiarises his former colleague’s work on renewable energy to great success, both for himself and the future of the planet. He does this out of greed, not because he particularly cares about anything beyond himself, certainly not anything so far beyond his complete solipsism as the entire world. He doesn’t even really believe in climate change.

Nonetheless, no-one else saw any potential in the plagiarised work – if he hadn’t stolen it, it would have been binned. Legally, Beard is in hot water, but morally, is plagiarising a work of world-altering importance really worse than consigning it to the dustbin? The motives are all wrong, but doesn’t the possible outcome outweigh them?

In a rather different fashion, much of the comedy in the book comes from taking the piss out of earnest artists, writers and academics from literature departments who either think that their art can, in some facile way, do some actual good in the world, or believe that climate change can be studied and disseminated as a discourse, and attempt to intellectualise it out of the real world.

The artists’ trip to the Arctic, where they ride around in snowmobiles looking for signs of snowmelt, is an obvious example of this, but my absolute favourite bit in the book is an argument between Beard and an academic studying ‘the forms of narrative that climate science has generated’.

Beard has recounted a story that just happened to him in order to get some prospective investors on-side: a stranger opposite him on the train started eating Beard’s packet of crisps, and a brilliantly comic face-off ensues, culminating in Beard finding his crisps in his pocket, and realising that he was mistakenly eating the strangers’ crisps all along. The narratologist congratulates him on his inventive use of ‘the tale of the Unwitting Thief’, an archetypal urban myth, in order to make his point:

‘The writer Douglas Adams put a version of it in a novel in the mid eighties. He always insisted it had actually happened to him on a train – and that’s another common feature. By claiming it as personal experience, people localise and authenticate the story [...] what’s new about your version is the crisps. I’ve heard biscuits, apples, cigarettes, whole canteen lunches, never crisps. I might write it up for the Contemporary Legend Quarterly, if you don’t mind.’

Beard is understandably frustrated at the narratologist’s inability to recognise the authenticity of his experience. Nonetheless, when Beard returns home, he tells his girlfriend a more consciously sculpted version of the event , and the line between fact and fiction no longer seems so clear cut.

Of course, the final joke is that, as Beard is a character in a work of fiction, it didn’t actually happen to him – this is pure ‘Unwitting Thief’ (UT as it is ‘known in the field’). This is made all the better by the novel’s intersection with actual life experience - when McEwan read the crisps scene out to an audience at Hay festival in 2008, he was accused of plagiarising the Douglas Adams scene, which used biscuits. What was new about McEwan’s version was, precisely, ‘the crisps’. In response, McEwan has turned his piece of unwitting theft into an example of the ‘Unwitting Thief’. Brilliant – and made even more so by the fact that the ‘Unwitting Thief’ is a real archetype analysed by narratologists. You couldn’t make it up (or could you?).

McEwan’s hallmark is to centre his novels around a moment in time which have absolutely life-changing consequences. These can work poignantly and heartbreakingly, as in Atonement and On Chesil Beach, where the nuances of human psychology are convincingly, and utterly frustratingly, rendered. Being satire, the set-piece of Solar is blunter, almost cartoonish, but ultimately effective in the book it was in, although I tend to prefer McEwan’s more ponderous, serious, writing. If I find Solar a lesser work than Atonement or On Chesil Beach, among the best books of our time, it may be merely because of this personal bias.

McEwan’s main problem always seems to me to be endings: his biggest comic effort before Solar, Amsterdam, actually had me shouting in rage at the contrivances of the finale. The appalling heavy handedness of Saturday’s ending, with Daisy managing not only to stop a hardened criminal from raping her, but actually reducing him to tears, by quoting Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ was so stomach-turningly mawkish that I couldn’t even feel angry. These are serious criticisms, but the fact that I find this so frustrating does at least attest to McEwan’s brilliance – if he didn’t paint his characters so vividly, they would never be able to evoke such disappointment in any eventual failings.

If Solar’s ending does, as other critics have suggested, wrap up a little perfunctorily, it does bring all the threads of narrative together admirably and satisfyingly. The groundwork for Beard’s comeuppance is well drawn out and not entirely predictable, and left me with the rather unsettling feeling that, whilst I had thought I was witnessing a comedy, what had unfolded was, in fact, a tragedy.

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