Guilty Fat Man

Solar, by Ian McEwan; Jonathan Cape, 2010, 285 pages, $32.95.

Let’s suppose it’s true, as George Orwell thought it was, that a good writer’s “emotional attitude” sets in young and is never fully escaped. What kind of kid, then, might Ian McEwan have been?

He was either a very naughty little boy, or, early on, he was made to feel that he was. McEwan is a novelist obsessed with the morality of guilty men. Now sixty-one, in his twelfth novel, Solar, he gives us Michael Beard, a guilty fat man who might just save the world.

Or maybe he won’t. When we meet him, in the year 2000, it doesn’t seem likely that he will. Beard turned fifty-three in July and is busy losing his fifth wife through neglect. Patrice is bonking the builder and, despite having pursued several affairs himself over the course of the couple’s five-year childless marriage, Beard is feeling stung. The bombs are battering the home front. His domestic world in turmoil, Beard takes cover behind the parapet of science.

One of the pleasures of reading McEwan’s more recent novels is the way he sets a character’s private drama amid the moral crisis of a particular time. Think of the politics of war in Saturday (2005), with the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne peering through a London windowpane watching a burning plane approach Heathrow. On Chesil Beach (2007) saw the two fumbling newlyweds Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting dumped by the wave of emerging sexual liberation. And Beard, we learn, is Professor Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. As a much younger man he won fame for a set of calculations known as the Beard-Einstein Conflation. Who better, then, to solve the world’s imminent energy crisis?

Without spoiling too much of the plot, it turns out there is someone better. His name is Tom Aldous. Aldous is one of the bright young post-doc students, or “ponytails”, who works under Beard in his role as “Chief” of the National Centre for Renewable Energy. Beard hasn’t had an original scientific thought in two decades. He lives off a series of sinecures and is jealous of the students’ fresh minds and youthful enthusiasm. They speak too quickly, and, unlike the professor, they have absorbed the latest in theoretical physics.

Beard accepts an invitation to join a group of twenty artists and scientists on an expedition to the Arctic Circle. The members of the idealistic group are, with the exception of Beard, “concerned about climate change”. Beard wants to get out of London and avoid real work. His cheek may still be burning from a humiliating encounter with Patrice’s lover, but in the weeks before he sets off from Heathrow bound for a frozen fjord he finds time for a brief fling with a dull accountant.

The thirty-five-page account of Beard’s freezing fact-finding mission to “see climate change for himself” is not laugh-out-loud funny, but it did make this reader smile. McEwan took a similar trip while researching Solar. The Sunday Times reported in March that some members of the expeditionary force were mildly put out by the way McEwan rendered their antics in the novel. They come across as a bunch of flippant hypocrites. Here’s McEwan’s description of Jesus, a famous ice sculptor from Mallorca:

an elderly man with a mournful face and curved yellowish-white moustache who smelled richly of cigars, and had a wheezing, honking sound in his voice like a terry bear’s growl … Jesus had won many ice-carving competitions in cities around the world—a recent triumph was in Riyadh—and his specialty was penguins.

 The novel is divided into three year-long sections; 2000, 2005 and 2009. Part One ends with a domestic disaster for Beard, one that elicits a morally reprehensible response from the professor. The disaster is sufficiently juicy to make the press, and it sets up Beard’s professional activities in the next two sections. The episode is McEwan at his artful best, building an exquisite set piece that tickles the reader with the gravity of its moral consequences. It’s at least as good as the tragic opening to Enduring Love (1997) when five men dangle from a rope tied to a grey hot-air balloon, each man unaware how seriously his life is about to change.

As for Part Two and Part Three, suffice to say that by the novel’s end Beard is overseeing the construction of the solution, or what he thinks is the solution, to the world’s energy problems. McEwan also takes us back to Beard’s youth and his first failed marriage. Back in the present again and he’s spoiling another relationship; two if you count the dumpy American waitress Darlene. There’s a child, a health scare and a big bang—or at the very least a series of shattering crashes—at the end.

And in the end, Solar is not so much a novel about climate change as it is a novel about the varied, often laughable responses to climate change. The novel carries an epigraph from John Updike’s Rabbit is Rich (1981) which reads: “It gives him great pleasure, makes Rabbit feel rich, to contemplate the world’s wasting, to know the earth is mortal too.” Solar is a novel that explores how we feel, and respond to, the prospect of annihilation. It is also the first novel to offer convincing fictional portraits of a motley cast of characters banging heads in the climate change debate. The scientist, the enviro-warrior, the artist, the businessman, the journalist and the citizen—they’re all here, and each is done well.

For what it’s worth, I came to this novel as a climate change sceptic and I left feeling much the same way. McEwan told the Guardian recently that “the best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction”. But, he said, he wanted to “get across … a sense of how difficult this task is going to be”. Always a meticulously researched writer, he would have read deeply on the subject. So it’s some worry when McEwan, who in his youth had difficulty choosing between a future in the arts or science, says that the science is in on man-made global warming. But I did not close the book feeling anything but a continuing respect for McEwan’s work. It’s a tribute to his artistry that he can write from both sides of the debate and make each side appear reasonable:

There was an Old Testament ring to the [climate change] forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over the centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world, and therefore made more sense, or was just a little less irrelevant. The end of the world was never pitched in the present, where it could be seen for the fantasy it was, but just around the corner, and when it did not happen, a new issue, a new date would soon emerge …

We either slow down, and then stop, or face an economic and human catastrophe on a grand scale within our grandchildren’s lifetime.

And this brings us to the central question, the burning question. How do we slow down and stop while sustaining our civilisation and continuing to bring millions out of poverty? Not by being virtuous, not by going to the bottle bank and turning down the thermostat and buying a smaller car. That merely delays the catastrophe by a year or two. Any delay is useful, but it’s not the solution. This matter has to move beyond virtue … So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention, the pleasures of ingenuity and co-operation, the satisfaction of profit. Oil and coal are energy carriers, and so, in abstract form, is money. And the answer to that burning question is of course exactly where that money, your money, has to flow—affordable clean energy.

This is fine writing, but perhaps it is too early for a really good novel about climate change. The rancorous debate continues—the sceptic, the believer and the apathetic continue to jostle for position. McEwan has said he rewrote passages of Solar after Copenhagen, so the novel is set in the very recent past. It’s an attempt to engage with the times as they happen—always a difficult task for a writer, particularly for a novelist. McEwan should be commended for what is a serious attempt to nut it out in a piece of fiction, at a time when it’s hard to determine fiction from fact in much of the public debate on climate change.

Solar is not McEwan’s best novel, which is merely another way of saying I’ve enjoyed some of his other ones more. But if he’s guilty of any literary crime here, it’s only of a slight softening in his diamond-hard prose. Perhaps the softening is a consequence of the impossible job he set himself, which was to write a novel based on reason from what is, at times, an unreasonable and emotive debate. He’s tried to build the Taj Mahal out of talcum powder. So he falls short of an impossible task then, and in the failing gives us another gripping character—Professor Michael Beard, the guilty fat man trying to save the world.

David Barratt is a Sydney journalist.