Book Review

SHERIDAN GRISWOLD | Friday July 2, 2010 00:00

Ian McEwan (2010)  'Solar: A Novel'. London and, Nan A Talese and Jonathan Cape, Soft cover, 288 pages, P201.00. ISBN 978-0-224-09050-6.  Available through Exclusive Books.

Ian McEwan's Solar is his 13th book. It may not be one of his best, but the odds are it is his most entertaining, a novel for our times, presented in an outlandish manner, with unusual characters and a combination of preposterous events. How you respond to it will depend on the stance you take on global warming: a hoax, a warning or a calamity for the earth and all life on it. McEwan is a master of verisimilitude - he has even created an appendix with Nils Palsternacka's presentation speech for Michael Beard on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in physics for the Beard-Einstein Conflation. McEwan spent four years researching issues to write this novel.

Beard had given his life to the study of light. Yet he was a person who was unable to enlighten his own life. The novel opens in 2000. Beard's fifth wife, Patrice, a very striking teacher is having an open affair in response to his multitude of entanglements. He cannot stand that the fling is with a carpenter, Rodney Tarpin, who worked on their flat. Beard consistently failed his wives as, 'Thinking was all he had'. Tarpin was, in contrast, tall, muscular and capable.  At least all of Beard's marriages had been childless.

Professor Beard has been surviving on his title: 'Nobel Laureate'. It generated lucrative speaking engagements, consultancies, honorary university posts and other opportunities. He was an accomplished after-dinner speaker and one-day-a-week director of the National Centre for Renewable Energy outside Reading that started up with 'four temporary cabins in a sea of mud' and a team led by a civil servant, Jack Braby, of 'half a dozen underpaid postdoctoral physicists'. Their first project was to develop a WUDU or a Wind Turbine for Urban Domestic Use. One of the 'pony-tails', Tom Aldous, was more interested in solar energy. He agreed to join the team when he learnt Beard would lead it. He 'excitedly assumed that the Centre would have as its prime concern solar energy, particularly artificial photosynthesis and nanosolar'. Nuclear power was 'dirty, dangerous, expensive 'We've already got a nuclear power station up and running with a great safety record, making clean energy converting hydrogen to helium at no cost, nicely situated ninety-three million miles way' (page 27).

Aldous is full of cutting-edge ideas that could lead to patents for artificial photosynthesis to create electricity for the planet. He believed the planet was in peril from the continued reliance on fossil fuels and saw Beard as a future saviour, Aldous presented Beard with a large folder of his original work.

Then a freak accident removed Aldous and provided the means to eliminate Tarpin at the same stroke. Beard could use his quick intelligence to think through the problems presented by these men and arrive at a solution.But much of his life remained stagnant.

'Einstein had upended mankind's understanding of light, gravity, space, time, matter, and energy, founded modern cosmology, spoken out on democracy, on God or his absence, argued for the bomb, then against it, played the violin, sailed boats, had children, given his prize money to his first wife, invented a fridge. Beard had nothing beyond his Conflation, or his half of it. Like a ship-wrecked man, he had clung to his single plank and counted himself privileged' (page 51).

Beard is summoned to the North Pole, the only scientist to be present, to participate in an '80-Degrees North Seminar' on a ship anchored in the ice 115 km north of Longyearbyen on Swatland Island (part of Norway). At 53-years old, it could have been a life changing experience if he had been able to act on what he learnt about himself while there. Instead, his return on an earlier plane to London landed him in a totally unexpected confrontation that was to change his life forever.

Aldous has a reverence for Beard. He says to him, 'There's nothing like the Conflation, nothing like the elaboration of the photovoltaic's - nothing more elegant, nothing truer'. Beard actually had aversions he kept to himself: 'Greenery in general-gardening, country rambles, protest movements, photosynthesis, salads-was not to his taste' (page 89). From being a short and roly-poly baby, to short and 'Fatso Beard' in school, he kept growing from one plateau to the next, until at the end he has multiple chins, is 65 pounds overweight, and his addiction to food and alcohol blossom unrestrained.

The second part of 'Solar' opens with Beard surveying London from the air as his plane circles in a stack while waiting to land at Heathrow. McEwan is a master of writing up such scenes. Though his bulk had not reduced, his life had changed. Fired from the Centre over what has happened; 'Now planetary stupidity was his business'.

He had an 'artificial-photosynthesis project' going at Imperial College London with 15 employees.  Toby Hammer was his partner in trying to bring this project to reality in the southwestern deserts of the US.

Based on what he had learned from the file Aldous had given him, he now had a string of patents and was moving to convert energy from the sun through photosynthesis on a 400-acre site in New Mexico.

Beard has played a role in promoting physics in schools and getting females to become physicists, yet at a symposium, he put his foot in his mouth and was labelled a bigoted sexist. A talk to businessmen and pension-fund and hedge-fund managers (pages 149 to 157) on the possibilities of investment in solar energy he is both erudite and amusing; his delivery is interspersed with his growing queasiness caused by an over-zealous appetite.

All that he is devoting his life to now is encompassed in these pages. Your may find this superb hectoring or boring-I found it entertaining.

In London he had a firm relationship with Melissa, a woman who ran a string of businesses selling clothing for dancers. But he made clear to her that their relationship would not lead to her being his sixth wife. He spends, when possible, more time at her sumptuous place at Primrose Hill than at his sleazy flat in Dorset Square. Melissa is a good cook and good to him in all the other ways that made him happy.  She, too, has surprises in store for him, one that will also transform his life.

In the third part of the novel it is now 2009. It starts with a long section that was published already in The New Yorker Magazine (December 7 , 2009 - but not acknowledged), entitled 'The Use of Poetry'.

It is a beautiful section where Beard reminisces about his Oxford days and how he bedded and wed his first wife, Maisie Farmer. He was able in one week of intense studies to learn more about Milton than she had mastered in her entire career as a student. It was clear to him that his 'own special study would be light', so he was drawn to Milton's poem.

Beard's Lordsburg Artificial Photosynthesis Plant (LAPP) is to be launched. At the same time his past is about to catch up with him, including shades of those he had taken advantage of, those who still loved him in spite of everything and his health.

Though Beard has not denied Global Warming, he has remained a denialist when it comes to other aspects of his life: burning up women, refusing commitment; his gluttony and inebriation; of what he has done to destroy other people's lives.

As a scientist he knows that, 'Less than an hour's worth of all the sunlight falling on the earth would satisfy all the world's needs for a year ... the poorest countries in the world are solar-rich ... domestic consumers will love making power out of sunlight and selling it to the grid. It's primal' (page 155). One day the energy contained in a litre of water, 'three times the energy of a litre of gasoline', will be released. Thank you McEwan for this novel. E-mail: sheridangriswold@yahoo.com