Solar [ハードカバー]

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.