SOLAR - Ian McEwan

It is what the trade would call a ‘banker’; a new novel by Ian McEwan and with global warming as the backdrop. Sure fire winner, this. Unfortunately for me, I am not Mr McEwan’s greatest fan, and came to ‘Solar’ (£18.99, Jonathan Cape), fresh from one of my favourite writers, John Irving, which made the task a bit more challenging. At least it is a proper book, rather than his last offering ‘Chesil Beach’ which was more of a novella, almost a pamphlet!

'Solar' is the satirical story of Michael Beard, a frustrated Nobel Prize winning scientist who has traded, dined and slept on his early career success for far too long. He has been appointed to head a government think-tank on climate change, largely on the basis that a Nobel Prize winner on the letterhead adds a certain something to any project.

McEwan does not bless Beard with any real virtues: he is fat, lazy, bored and cynical. His fifth marriage is collapsing - to his shock, due to his wife’s infidelities rather than his. However, this lack of appeal is balanced by McEwan’s eye for detail and ability to translate that into a strong narrative and an ability to construct realistic characters out of a few phrases. We are told relatively little of the various other characters, especially the women in Beard’s life, yet we seem to know them.

Early on in the book, Beard is invited on a celebrity and artist filled trip to observe the effect of global warming on the Arctic ice cap. It is with a delicious sense of irony that he observes the chaos of equipping twenty souls with the necessary clothing for their polar expedition and stopping them from losing any, even in the confines of their ship base. How can they hope to save the world if they cannot even find their snow boots?

However it is an incident, on his return home that provides the turning point and entwines Beard in an ever more complicated personal and professional web. The book takes place over several periods of time in the last ten years and in locations as diverse as the Arctic Circle to the New Mexico desert. McEwan deftly ties the strings tighter until Beard, totally enmeshed in a personal and professional mess of his own making, gets an unlikely glimpse of some little redemption, just too late.

McEwan still may not be my favourite, but he is on good form here.

UPDATE

This book has been shortlisted for the 'Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction', which comes as something of a surprise, being comic being something of a requirement I would have thought. It is certainly far lighter in style than earlier McEwan and darkly satirical, but more wry smile than comic. Still, what do I know?