Helpful Score: 1
This story is current and topical. McEwan's description of characters is spot on. The main character, Michael Beard is totally unsympathetic but his motivations are understandable. A good profile of a scientist and his science and how it informs his personal relationships. He is intensly human and believable with all of his failings. As long as human beings are involved, saving the world will not be easy.
Solar is another quintessential McEwan offering of a morally questionable character cast in an elegant but harsh light. This time the protagonist is Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who lets himself go to seed in numerous ways. When we meet him, Beard, coasting on his prize from Stockholm, has not done any serious scientific work for years and his fifth marriage is starting to fail as he is cuckolded by a younger wife whom he still desires. Set in three acts each about five years apart, Beard begins to work on artificial photosynthesis as a clean energy source, allowing Beard to sustain illusions of grandeur and McEwan to comment on climate change and human nature. McEwan's prose is elegant, understated, and biting as always, and he brings the story to a good climax. However, to stick with Beard's indulgences and somewhat repulsive nature for ~300 pages might not be everyone's cup of tea.
An average book not as polished as Saturday or Atonement. It deals with climate change, global warming and artifical photysynthesis. Michael Beard the prize winning physicist, also a multiple marriage person and philanderer, steals Tom Aldous patent for climate change, causes Tom Aldous's death inadvertently and blames his ex-wife's lover for it.
Wow. Not his easiest, not his quickest, but the satire is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Mostly it's a long, nasty journey with another McEwen-esque non-hero. So let's say, not exactly fun, but worth it at the end.
