Staring at the sun

SOLAR

By Ian McEwan

283 pages

Available at National Book Store

We know that, in Greek mythology, Icarus flew too close to the sun with borrowed wings and plummeted to the sea. Some would call that tragic. But it’s hard to imagine Michael Beard — the Nobel Prize laureate physicist in Ian McEwan’s latest novel Solar — achieving such stellar liftoff; not with his spreading bulk, penchant for salted crisps and booze, and fatal attraction to women.

In Solar, McEwan takes a break from the “high literary” style he employed in previous novels Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach and returns to the chiseled blade of satire, closer to his slim 1998 Booker Prize winner, Amsterdam.

Here, instead of an overpraised “genius” composer tasked to write a “Millennium Opera,” we have Beard, a man whose early success in light theory — appending Einstein’s ideas on photovoltaics — earned him a Nobel Prize, enabling him to rack up a messy string of marriages, affairs and divorces, and attain a general level of laziness that precludes thinking “outside the box.” At the start of the novel, set in 2000, Beard heads the Centre for Renewable Energy in Reading, England, where he weeds through hundreds of crackpot energy solutions and endures the nattering of countless “ponytails” — post-grad physicists who pontificate on “solar” and “wind” as the future. On the sidelines, Beard’s fifth wife, Patricia, is having an affair right under his nose — payback for the countless affairs the portly, 50-ish Beard has had. With this as a backdrop, McEwan unfolds a series of events that are devilishly ironic, wickedly humorous, full of suspense — vintage McEwan, in short.

Beard is a cynic, a scientific skeptic of solar power; but he sees how it could resurrect his flagging scientific cred. In 2000, with Bush battling Gore over the presidency and energy direction of the US, McEwan shows us how so many in the scientific community sat on the fence while the earth warmed.

Climate change was one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected the government to meet and take action. And of course he knew that a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbed energy in the infrared range, and that humankind was putting these molecules into the atmosphere in significant quantities. But he himself had other things to think about. And he was unimpressed by some of the wild commentary that suggested the world was in “peril,” that humankind was drifting towards calamity, when coastal cities would disappear under the waves, crops fail, and hundreds of millions of refugees surge from one country, one continent to another, driven by drought, floods, famine, tempests, unceasing wars for diminishing resources. There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world, and therefore made more sense, or was just a little less irrelevant. 

Tired of the ponytails — particularly a gangly post-grad named Tom Aldous who batters Beard with theories about “reverse photosynthesis” and how to extract hydrogen from water to create clean energy — the Nobel laureate heads to the North Pole for an energy conference, where he has an excruciating incident while relieving himself in sub-zero temperatures on a snowmobile trek (trust me, it’s McEwan at his horrifyingly funniest); then undergoes a sea change (or so we think) as the book shifts ahead five years, to ‘05.

By then, Beard has moved forward on patents to construct vast solar panel complexes in deserts, where, scientists explain, a mere hour or two of strong sunlight per day can produce enough electricity — if distributed — to power the entire planet. Beard tries to drum up private investors for the half-a-trillion-dollar venture, though we see that little has actually changed in his own lifestyle or the world’s equally vociferous appetites: people still drive SUVs, jumbo jets still cart solar scientists around the world, pumping hydrocarbons into the atmosphere by the millions; and Michael Beard has put on another 20 or so pounds while trying to keep another amorous (if unlikely) beauty from bearing his child.

Beard tells investors not to think of virtue, but of their own “self-interest” in choosing solar — they all stand to grow enormously rich by backing his scheme. As he did in the post-9/11 Saturday and the chaste ‘60s meditation On Chesil Beach, McEwan weaves together current events to capture the social zeitgeist — in this case, a moment in history when humankind, once again, could have chosen to be virtuous, instead of lazy and greedy. (If you know McEwan, you won’t hold your breath for a “Happily Ever After.”)

Solar may leave some environmentalists discouraged about the prospects of saving the planet — or our capacity for change — but it also gives them plenty of reasons to believe they’re right. In the midst of spinning an entertaining yarn about a supremely flawed character, McEwan manages to make a very convincing case for going solar — now, and in the future.

“Imagine we came across a man at the edge of a forest in heavy rainfall. This man is dying of thirst. He has an axe in his hand and he is felling the trees in order to suck sap from the trunks. There are a few mouthfuls in each tree. All round him is devastation, dead trees, no birdsong, and he knows the forest is vanishing. So why doesn’t he tip his head back and drink the rain? Because he cuts trees expertly, because he has always done it this way, because the kind of people who advocate rain-drinking he considers suspicious types.

“That rain is our sunlight. An energy source drenches our planet, drives its climate and its life. It falls on us in a constant stream, a sweet rain of photons.”

This pitch Beard recites to investors prior to launching his prototype energy collector in a New Mexico desert in 2009, near the novel’s end. The metaphor would sound immensely virtuous — almost poetic — if it hadn’t been plagiarized from a fellow scientist. But for all Beard’s unlikable qualities — coldness, arrogance, competitiveness, jealousy, hubris, sexual weakness, gluttony, a violent streak — he is a riveting character. The way in which author McEwan saves him from our utter contempt is akin to John Updike’s balancing act with his master creation, Rabbit Angstrom, particularly in Rabbit at Rest. (In fact, a quote from Rabbit is Rich prefaces Solar.) The ticking time bomb that is Beard is not unlike Rabbit, forcing another fried pork rind into his jaws even as his ticker slows down and his arteries clog up. In the wrong hands, Michael Beard would merely be a villain, a cad or a clown; in McEwan’s hands, he becomes something greater (and lesser): a little bit like us, or the “us” we sometimes backslide into being.