Q&A: Separating fact from fiction
This Ian McEwan fellow sounds familiar. The author of Atonement, Amsterdam and Saturday, McEwan is the kind of writer whose words make the news. When he mentioned he was writing a novel about climate change at a literary festival, The Guardian ran a front-page headline: Climate Change Plot for McEwan Novel.
He sounds influential. He goes to dinner regularly with fellow literary heavyweights Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens. But there can also be a downside to the star-filled life – offhand comments can spark a media frenzy. "I'm wary of the punditry that's offered to novelists. There's a constant pressure to declare on this or that matter," he told The Wall Street Journal last year. "Most of my energy in relation to these questions goes into my fiction."
Meet Michael Beard - fat, philandering and deaf to the warnings of global warming.
The anti-hero of the British author Ian McEwan's novel Solar, Beard was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics years ago and now thrives on it, accepting honorary chairmanships here and there without making fresh contributions to science.
He is a baby boomer and represents everything that many would say led to today's environmental crisis: greed, complacency and dishonesty.
Only a very good or very bad event could pull Beard out of his static state.
McEwan chooses the latter. A young scientist employed by Beard slips on a bearskin rug, falls on to a coffee table and dies, and the older scientist seizes the chance to send another man to jail and steal the dead man's intellectual work.
The chance event catapults Beard into the speakers' circuit at clean technology conferences, to the Middle East to evaluate solar sites and into millions of dollars of funding for the world's first solar plant that uses photosynthesis.
McEwan deftly explains the science of renewable energy without becoming boring, even if he does use some of the worn-out clean-technology terms.
However, from the mouth of a bumbler such as Beard, they become humorous. The most remarkable part of Solar is not that McEwan can craft a novel around climate change, which is already rife with drama, cash and politics.
It is that McEwan compels the reader to empathise with someone as morally repulsive as Beard.
Top 5: Best-sellers in fiction this week
1 The Help, Kathryn Stockett
2 Lethal, Sandra Brown
3 The Mill River Recluse, Darcie Chan
4 Heat Rises, Richard Castle
5 Son of Stone, Stuart Woods
Source: The New York Times
The Quote: To an eavesdropper it would have sounded like the essence of commercial tedium, but to the two men it was a matter of urgency. How many orders for solar panels … - Solar, Ian McEwan
