The trick of the novel, its central comic turn, is to make Beard, the greedy, selfish uber-consumer, an accidental expert on anthropogenic climate change. His behaviour is a local example of the more general problem of human over-consumption: just as Beard devours everything around him, so we are devouring our world, with its finite resources and fragile ecosystems. He's a resolute short-termist, fearful of commitment and of becoming a father, living for the here and now. He rapaciously consumes food, women and drink, with little regard for the consequences. Repeatedly in his fiction he sets reason against unreason, science against art, the mind against the body, technology against nature.īeard, who we are encouraged to believe won a Nobel prize in physics as a young man for something called the Beard-Einstein Conflation, is a short, fat, balding, much-married man of immense bodily appetites and scant self-discipline. As it is, he remains a determined binarist what continues to interest him are stark dichotomies, the clash and interplay of stable oppositions. Perhaps McEwan should have written against expectation by choosing as his protagonist a scientist who has a profound artistic sensibility in the model of his friend Richard Dawkins, or an artist who is articulate in the language of science, as McEwan is himself. We have met others like him before in McEwan's novels – such as Joe Rose, the science writer who narrates Enduring Love, or Henry Perowne, the brian surgeon protagonist of Saturday – but none is quite as repulsive as Beard. He's a recognisable Ian McEwan type, a one-dimensional, self-deceiving man of science. Solar is a sly, sardonic novel about a dislikable English physicist and philanderer named Michael Beard.

Amsterdam mcewan review