Customer Reviews

Solar (Random House Large Print)

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(48)
3 star:		(35)
2 star:		(29)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

McEwan's latest novel skewers fanatics, libertines, and the god-headed media, as well as taking an unapologetic stab at the politics and religiosity of 21st century science. He reveals the folly of doublethink, groupthink, and egomania in a ferocious satire of many-layered complexity. When you close the pages of the book, you are apt to appreciate it more as it settles into the parts of your brain that mingle literature with social commentary. The entertainment value is actually eclipsed by its brilliance, the dazzling rays reaching out to prior gems and reflecting an awful lot of sublime light. It's cheeky, satirical, uncomfortable, and to some readers, it will be controversial.

Our unsympathetic protagonist is Michael Beard. (I note that the name is no accident, a beard being a person that is used by someone else to cover something up, and Michael meaning someone who is like God.) Michael is a 50-something former Nobel laureate, resting on his fleshy laurels from twenty-two years ago, where he stood on the shoulders of Einstein and proposed a scientific "Conflation Theory" that was trailblazing at the time. Now, he tours around the globe giving lectures and consults for a large fee, and he sits idly as a member of a board at a center for renewable energy in the UK. His main pursuit is women, and he pursues them with -aholic depravity. As the novel opens, his fifth marriage is falling apart due to his infidelities. But this time, his wife got the last word by having some side dishes for herself and leaving him labeled as the cuckold.

Michael is a bozo with a brain. He is selfish, hideous, immoderate, and amoral. He exploits what he sees as the folly and weakness of the mass ideology in order to feed his degenerate egomania, but he is in denial of his own foolishness and excesses. He observes the current hysteria of global warming fanatics. (By the way, don't kill the messenger--I am not denying the seiousness of climate change, but rather sharing aspects of the novel). He compares them to Old Testament Armageddon-addicts and peril-seekers. He proclaims that global warming has created so much heat that it has evolved into a religion of sorts, so that even left-wing atheists have merged science and religion into a cataclysmic catastrophe, a noble purpose--and, for some people, a fanatical life quest.

Well, Beard wants IN. He swindles and schemes and adopts ideas as his own, swaggering in with a proposal for a renewable energy source by artificial photosynthesis. He commits the most menacing breach of humanity and moral ethics in order to achieve his aims, and the reader can see him barreling toward comeuppance right out of the starting gate. His massive appetite for food and women continue to grow--he feeds the beast and the Buddha-belly at every opportunity, and drinks booze like water. He fervently maintains his invincibility as a hustler and a savior of mankind. Along the way are moments of physical comedy that are sheer hilarity, reminiscent of the Farrelly and the Coen brothers. And his apartment is so squalid it would make Dickens howl.

McEwan pays homage, with his own brand of subversive humor, to previous literary monuments. There is a character with the surname Aldous, and a twisted reference to the sex-hormone chewing gum, saluting Brave New World (P.S.), and the doubethinking of Nineteen Eighty-Four. There's also a nod to the water-sharing (substituted with Scotch) and media circus of Stranger in a Strange Land, and the mob frenzy of The Bonfire of the Vanities is also peppered throughout the story.

In order to appreciate this novel, the reader must be OK with a thoroughly revolting reprobate as a protagonist, and able to find humor in the tempest of global warming politics. Additionally, the reader is going to encounter that Beard is the only fleshed-out character. If that doesn't appeal to you, this may not be your cuppa. In lesser hands, I would not have enjoyed the focus on a singular person, with no supporting characters rounding out the story. Moreover, the prose gets scientifically dense, even verbose, at times. It was on the verge of distracting me from the novel's momentum at intervals, but not enough to thwart my pleasure. As I mentioned earlier in this review, the more I think about SOLAR, the more of its merits shine through.

If you scan the large body of comments placed here, and if you track down the published reviews of major book critics, you'll find that reactions to McEwan's new novel have been -- to use a word from the lexicon of the book's physicist protagonist -- polarized. Many reviewers, especially the British establishment critics, declared "Solar" a delightful work by a master, well worth your while. Others, especially on this side of the pond, vented their disappointment, perhaps best expressed by an online critic who headlined his review: "A Flabby Character Portrait."

With the verdict on the book's merits a split decision, it doesn't seem useful simply to add to the chorus of contradictory conclusions ("Yes, it's brilliant!" "No, it's a waste of your time!"). Instead, let me offer some guidelines for you to consider if you're thinking of reading "Solar."

- Are you expecting an experience comparable to McEwan's recent novels? If so, be forewarned that "Solar" is not cut from the same cloth. In the best of his recent works, McEwan provides readers with the supreme pleasure of a plot and characters that fully seize your consciousness and sympathy. He composes set pieces with such fine craftsmanship that you forget you are engaged in the act of reading. You lose awareness of the author's guiding hand. These are the moments readers long for: being pulled forward by a frictionless, seemingly unmediated flow of story and emotion. The opening chapter of "Enduring Love" and parts of "Saturday" achieve this magical state. Many readers, myself included, experienced this phenomenon most memorably amid the sweep of "Atonement". So a red flag must be raised this time: if you pick up "Solar," do not expect to enjoy anything similar. The book is lighter, less engrossing; it is a lark, an entertainment, its enjoyments of a different order.

- Are you usually annoyed when an irredeemably bad character occupies center stage in a novel you are reading? Do you choose your fictional heroes and heroines as carefully as you do your friends? If so, best stay clear of "Solar." Even those readers who ended up enjoying other features of the writing concede the book's protagonist -- the sole thread of continuity among the vignettes that comprise the novel as it jumps around in time and geography -- is a thoroughly despicable human being. In his own words, Michael Beard is "neither observant nor sensitive." This makes him an odd choice to carry the weight of the story. Worse yet, Beard is an inveterate liar and thief; a criminal in the making; and morally bankrupt ("But why should he feel guilt? Someone please tell him why.") At the book's end he begins to acknowledge the hell he's put people through ("Someone, or everyone, will be disappointed. Nothing new there.") Yet he doesn't much care. Being in his company is a chore -- for his five discarded wives, for his professional colleagues, and, possibly, for you as a reader.

- Are you in the mood for a picaresque comedy/satire? Take care to note "Solar" is being ballyhooed by its publisher as a "comedy" -- a book plum-filled with "comedic antics". Humor is a tricky subject for a reviewer to tackle: there are few things more subjective, more personal, than the question of what is funny. With that in mind, consider the serio-comic episode, set in the Arctic, in which Beard joins a group of environmentalist-artists on an excursion to receding glaciers. When McEwan launches into his jokes, you may be struck by how the best laughs are borrowed ones. Even if you think the author's recycling of old jokes fits within acceptable bounds of comedy piracy, you will struggle to call the humor "novel."

For example [Spoiler Alert (jokes revealed in this paragraph)], you will probably laugh again at the dilemma of a child straight-jacketed by winter clothing rendering him helpless. This is a staple of cartoons such as "The Family Circus" and "Peanuts"; kid-centered sitcoms; and movies such as "A Christmas Story" (remember the bundled up Randy?). This old chestnut is cadged by McEwan for a scene where Beard, who in so many ways is a child-like man, prepares for a sub-zero trek by donning layers and layers of clothes including multiple gloves -- only to discover his self-mummification bars him from putting on his boots, not to mention answering a call of nature. Next, you might squirm with delight, as you've done before, when Beard undergoes a variation on the "There's Something About Mary" film gag of genitals caught in a pants zipper. You may also be familiar with the lines coined by Robert Mankoff back in 1993 and used as the caption for a cartoon published in "The New Yorker" (one of its most popular ever). In the cartoon, an executive, looking at his date book and trying to dissuade a caller who's asking for an appointment, says: "No, Thursday's out. How about never -- is never good for you?" If this is part of your memory bank, you will smile again when reading a flash-back scene in "Solar," set in the early 1950's, as a co-ed parries a young Beard's request for a date by replying: "How about never? Can you make never?" [End of Spoiler Alert].

- Are you interested in a British author's take on America? If so, you will find McEwan's attention to things American to be an attractive aspect to "Solar." This is the first of McEwan's novels to be set in whole or in part in the U.S. In the book's final section, McEwan shows a fondness for our manners and our civic culture. At one point he describes "the plenitude and strangeness of America as represented by its television." He favorably notices "the intimate politeness at which Americans excel." Beard thinks about his female companion in New Mexico in these terms: "She was so merry, so hopelessly optimistic and well-disposed. So American." And of course the climate is better: "Always a delicious moment to be savored, and never to be had in the British Isles, when, showered and perfumed and wearing fresh clothes, one steps out from the air-conditioning into the smooth, invincible warmth of a southern evening."

(Mike Ettner)

I've spent the past 20+ years working at the margins of academia, currently work at a scientific research institute, and live with someone in the solar energy field, so when I read the blurb about Ian McEwan's new novel, I couldn't resist ordering it. Although I'd never read any of his books before, I knew his reputation, so I figured it would be worth the read.

And by and large, it is, if only for his scathing satire of the scientific world, with all its egos, posturing and pretensions. I was mightily impressed not only with McEwan's grasp of the pettiness, jealousy and dysfunction that are so prevalent among the uber-educated, but also with the extensive research that obviously went into his descriptions of alternative energy technologies and solar energy in particular.

The catch, however, is that his protagonist, Nobel laureate Michael Beard, is a thoroughly repellent character, and what I found laugh-out-loud funny in the beginning became increasingly tedious as the book wore on. In tone, Solar is vaguely reminiscent of Tom Sharpe's books, only darker and a whole lot more literary. A brilliant physicist in his younger days, who has been coasting for years on his one big breakthrough and the Nobel it earned him, Beard is a compulsive philanderer whose fifth marriage is on the rocks. Amoral and utterly selfish, Beard engages in a series of self-serving and self-destructive actions that grow increasingly predictable throughout the book, until the chickens come home to roost in the final segment. (It's worth noting that contrary to the promotional blurb, only the final third of the book is set in New Mexico. And a small gripe: McEwan could have used a little minor editing to eliminate the Britishisms in the dialogue of his American characters.)

McEwan is brilliant in the utterly original language he uses to describe his characters and the often farcical situations and settings they find themselves in, but in the end, his literary legerdemain can't overcome the fact that just about everyone in the book is unlikable.

Four stars for the stellar writing; the general unpleasantness of the characters and plot prevent me from awarding it a fifth star.

Brief summary, no spoilers.

Our protagonist in this story is a middle-aged man named Michael Beard. Michael is a brilliant physicist who won a Nobel Prize early in his career, but he hasn't done much professionally since then. Michael takes on the task of solving the global warming crisis. He does this not because of his sense of goodwill or because he cares about saving humanity, but more because he is an opportunist and he sees the personal advantage in his doing so. He's not even convinced that global warming exists, and doesn't really care.

Michael is a serial womanizer, to say the least. He has been married five times, and cheated on them all. His charm comes not from his physical looks (he is described as short and dumpy), but from his brilliant mind and impressive resume, and his clever machinations to get all these women to fall in love with him. He is almost sociopathic in his detachment to them all, and in fact, to his feelings in general.

The story is told in 3 parts - first in the year 2000, as Michael's fifth wife has decided to leave him. As Michael tries to win her back, we read about his professional and personal life, the concealment of a crime, and the theft of intellectual property. Plus, we have an unbelievably harrowing description of a journey to the Arctic, with a scene so shocking that I'll never forget it. This first section of the book is my favorite, and classic McEwan.

We then go on to sections 2 and 3. We also go back in time learn about Michael's upbringing and what makes him tick and about his lack of empathy and attachment. The last section takes us to the present, as Michael is on the verge of being famous and being credited with coming up with a solar solution to the global warming crisis. But of course this is a McEwan novel, and there will always be a price to pay for Michael's sins, as well as a skewering of politics in general.

I am a big fan of Ian McEwan, and have read all of his books. When he has a new book out, I read it right away, and this one was no exception. I enjoyed this novel, but like his book Saturday, there is a lot of technical discussion. In Saturday we learned a lot about surgery - in this novel it's quantum mechanics and global warming theory. For some readers this may slow the story down, but I was impressed with McEwan's research and thought the balance between scholarly narrative and interesting plot was just perfect. And as always, I think this author has some fantastic and profound observations about humanity and the ability to string together just the most perfect words to express these ideas.

Atonement is still my favorite McEwan book, with Enduring Love a close second. But I did enjoy this book and recommend it.

Michael Beard, a 53 year old physicist with a Nobel prize for his work on the `Beard-Einstein Conflation' in quantum physics, is past his prime. Overweight, in his fifth failed marriage, his career stalling, he is also out of sympathy with the scientific momentum on global warming - he finds all the earnest talk of the `planet in peril' too `Old Testament'.

But redemption may be at hand through the work of one of the enthusiastic post-doctoral advocates of artificial solar photosynthesis at the National Centre for Renewable Energy which Beard heads. Alas, things start to go wrong - the project hits economic, technical and intellectual property snags, and it is buffeted by the resurgence of global warming denialism.

Beard's failed romantic past also returns to haunt him in the form of an obsessive, delusional house-builder who had been having an affair with Beard's wife and has since been released from prison where he had been stewing for eight years after being framed by Beard to avoid Beard being presumed guilty for the death of the solar-impassioned post-doc who had also been having an affair with Beard's wife but who had accidentally slipped on a polar bear skin rug and died from a head injury during a confrontation with Beard.

Will the builder extract revenge? Will true love finally find a way for Michael Beard? Will Beard's company, Concentrated Solar Power, conquer the renewables market and save the planet? Who cares - alas, this is the answer, for this first novel to take global warming as its theme, by a major Booker-winning British author, is as noxious as a dirty coal-fired power station.

Although it is a page-turner, the motivation is more to discover what literary oil-slicks the coming pages hold. Plot implausibilities. Clumping, wooden dialogue. The science content clumsily grafted onto the love (or, more often, soap opera) interest (caught in the post-coital act of infidelity with Beard's wife, the solar-impassioned post-doc launches into a highly improbable disquisition on quantum coherence in photosynthesis).

The science rarely rises above tick-boxing of exotic lists (superstrings, hetrotic strings, M-theory, the `delightful intricacies of calabi-Yau manifolds and orbifolds'), stilted exposition of quantum theory and one stale joke (the string theorist caught in bed with another woman who exclaims to his wife, `Darling, I can explain everything!').

Politically, the quality is no better. Beard publicly airs his views that women's brains do not fit them as well as men's brains for engineering and physics, provoking protests which McEwan dismissively lampoons as a witch-hunt by `politically-correct' ideologues. Fanned by McEwan, the aroma of burning martyr is strong. So, to match the `Beard-Einstein Conflation' we now have what could be termed the `Beard-McEwan Conflation' which conflates feminism with `political correctness' and postmodernism in a defence of biological determinism.

The environmental politics are also abysmal. McEwan's sympathies are with carbon trading schemes and other market `solutions' to global warming, which are claimed to not only solve the environmental problem but, as Beard enthuses, make "very large sums of money, staggering sums" for their entrepreneurs. In the end, Beard, and his creator, settle comfortably on nuclear energy as the fall-back solution. "Was not the 28-kilometre exclusion zone around Chernobyl now the biologically richest and most diverse region of Central Europe", concludes Beard in a bold brief for the benefits of nuclear radiation.

If Solar is representative of contemporary literature, then give me Dickens.

The wonders Ian McEwan introduces us to in SOLAR involve a mad yet hilarious scientist groping both sexually and intellectually toward a professional summit even his Nobel in physics hasn't granted him. McEwan's Fallstaffian protagonist Michael Beard -- too villainous to be called an antihero, too enthralling to be written off as a simple cad -- manages to charm even as he is in the process of betraying his colleagues, plagiarizing the work of a young genius, even pinning a murder charge on a romantic rival. Beard's gluttonous appetite for wine, women and food competes with his passion for success at any price. His ambition to be applauded for an original way of replacing fossil fuels with heat from the sun leads Beard to take risk after risk until he has drawn a noose of suspicion around himself. How will he slip the noose, or will he hang from it? A review of SOLAR in New Scientist says McEwan's "science is excellent and bang up to date." So is his prose.

Boring! At page 117 (out of 283) I am closing the book and returning to library. I have fallen asleep over this book so many times I can't count. The self absorbed, pathetic main character holds no interest and engenders no sympathy. Usually I expect a book to grab me within the first five pages. Sometimes it takes a little longer. But I hold no hope for this treatise on narcissism. Not one character jumps out as someone you would like to know, or even talk with. If you can't present the issue in an engaging way within the first half of the book, why would I expect it to get better in the last half? Backs to the shelves.

Michael Beard is short, fat, bald and slovenly. He is riding (not resting) on his laurels which are a Nobel Prize that he won thirty years ago. For some reason, beautiful women are attracted to him. He likes marrying them and is currently in the process of breaking up with wife number six. Uh, he also likes women that he's not married to which may have something to do with his high turnover rate. Beard has a rich and hilarious inner dialogue which strikes me as Ignatius O'Reilly if he was smart enough to win the Nobel Prize. He's not a bad guy. He just doesn't care about anyone else except himself. He doesn't actively not care about them, it just never occurs to him to do so. He's actually a rather likeable sort.

Beard sets out to regain his intellectual stardom with a "free solar energy" system. The science seems mostly right (would I know if it wasn't? Honestly no). We follow him through the follies and foibles that his apathetic narcissism creates.

I enjoyed reading this book, so why did I only give it 3.5 stars. It's because I wasn't riveted. I put the book down for weeks at a time. Perhaps it's because it was summer and I was off doing other things. If it was January maybe I would have been all over it. I really did enjoy it. It just never occurred to me to give it more than 3.5 stars. That said, it's worth the read.

Let me just preface this review by saying that I am a fan of Mr. McEwan. I consider his novel, Atonement, to be one of the truly great books of recent years. I've also read and enjoyed a number of his other works. That said, I find this novel, Solar, to be a disappointment.

As a strong prose stylist, McEwan's books are always interesting to read and there are well-done features to this story. In it, he shows his facility with modern science and its impact on social problems, something he's done in previous books as well. This time around, the subject is global warming. Wisely, he stays away from taking a specific stance on the issue even as Michael Beard, his Nobel prize-winning physicist lead character, takes a "lucky" opportunity to explore the issue in his work, thereby putting it before the reading in a subtle way.

On the other hand, this book suffers from two features also present in some of his previous novels, but not to the extent that they impact the story as negatively as they do here. The first is a plot point. Like many excellent novelists, McEwan's novels often turn on a strange event or an odd, coincidental encounter. Sometimes this works very well--I am thinking of Briony's lie in Atonement, for example. Sometimes this works less well, as in the break-in that nearly ruins the last quarter of his otherwise excellent book, Saturday. (Spoiler alert-->) Here, we have an accidental death that for reasons I still don't quite understand or believe, Beard disguises as a murder. Unfortunately, this happens rather early in the story, is important for everything that follows, and, therefore, decreases whatever enjoyment can be found in the rest of the book.

The second problem is something that bothers me personally, but may be less important to other readers. I do not like books where there is, essentially, not a single likeable character with hardly even a redeeming quality. Michael Beard, for example, is almost completely pathetic--a Nobel prize-winner living off his laurels, guilty of intellectual theft, a serial divorcer, a serial adulterer, an absent father, obese, slovenly...Just an all-around poor specimen of a human being. As Beard is the overwhelming personality in this novel, it is rough going, but even the minor characters--mean-spirited ex-wives, abusive boyfriend of ex-wife, pathetic girlfriends, abandoned daughter, grasping colleagues--there's barely a thing to like about the bunch. These are not people with whom I want to spend my time.

Which is too bad, because McEwan's talent is immense. Even with my disappointments, I had no trouble making it to the end of the book. I am hoping, however, he reins in some of his impulses next time around for a tighter, more pleasurable experience.

I am not much of a fiction reader and do not hesitate to throw a book back if it doesn't engage me within the first 30 pages; this one never came close to being abandoned. Good story, good science. It's funny and engaging, on par with the best of Evelyn Waugh ("The Loved One") or Tom Wolfe ("A Man in Full").