Ian McEwan
Solar

It was difficult to foresee a humorous twist for the dark and morbid Ian McEwan, the English writer who achieved literary glory by narrating obsessive existential parables of orphaned and incestuous children. Yet, the splendid Atonement of 2002, with its fascinating changes in rhythm and tone, already hinted at McEwan's talent in adapting his sumptuous and protean prose to any type of narrative.

We are therefore presented with, in Solar, a comedic-satirical novel where the English writer's narrative talent is at the service of a colossal fresco of our times, crafted in the key of sulfurous and grotesque black comedy.
Humor, yes, but the kind of humor that is far from reassuring, as one might expect from an unmistakable author like Ian "Macabre" McEwan. Throughout the 339 pages of the novel, the funny moments are countless, often priceless, but they tend to elicit a smirk rather than laughter. The general tone of the narrative is set on notes of mocking and fierce ridicule: ridicule in all directions that seems to strike all characters, with a particular fondness for the despicable, unforgettable protagonist.

Solar is a novel that speaks of today, through a theme that summarizes and symbolizes the essence of the times we are living in. At the time of another grand satirical fresco somewhat similar to this one - Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove - the key issue catalyzing collective anxieties was nuclear catastrophe. Now there is a new imminent catastrophe to deal with, the climatic-ecological one: a real danger or just another sign of the human tendency to create apocalyptic ghosts in every era?

Professor Michael Beard of Solar initially has no doubts: every phase of human history must contend with «man's deeply-rooted tendency, perpetuated over the centuries, to always believe they are living at the end of times, to see their death as indissolubly linked to the extinction of the world and thus a bearer of meaning, or at least a little less irrelevant». Beard is much more interested in his own private troubles than in the climate issue: the book's opening shows him grappling with the disaster of his latest marriage, the fifth, which is falling apart due to mutual extramarital affairs.

«Plump, slow, rosy, hot», Beard has passed 50 and left behind a distant past of glorious successes in physics (having won the Nobel Prize in his youth thanks to the "Beard-Einstein Conflation") and a recent past of marital disasters and personal excesses. Beard is a vicious and selfish scoundrel who no longer even has the alibi of genius: he has long since lost all interest in science, living off his past prestige, and has become a powerful bureaucrat who, among other occupations, also runs a renewable energy research center.

Here, Beard will come across a young researcher, Tom Aldous, as ingenuous and idealistic as he is talented and brilliant. The unexpected crossing of destinies between the protagonist, his wife Patrice, and Aldous will trigger a bizarre series of consequences: five years later, Beard, suddenly converted into a prophet of global warming, will head a grand project on solar energy based precisely on the scientific insights of the young Aldous...

McEwan is relentless with his protagonist, a true monster of decadence who has turned his existence into a ridiculous apotheosis of physical pleasure for its own sake (with a particular fondness for food and sex), without worrying about the emotional rubble caused by his misanthropic and selfish attitude. Not only does McEwan offer him no mitigation or discounts, but he places him in direct contact with an issue as imposing and crucial as global warming.

It is precisely in this that Solar's grand satirical strength lies, in this confrontation that resonates, sometimes explicit, sometimes implied, in every line of the novel: the confrontation between the ridiculous obtuseness and weaknesses of humans - of which Beard is the undisputed champion - and the enormity, complexity, the weight of the choices and actions that humanity is compelled to undertake in such a delicate phase of its history.
It is an objectively chilling confrontation, but at the same time irredeemably comic: and McEwan has a world of fun in highlighting the most crudely farcical and grotesque aspects of this disproportion, conveying to the reader the perverse pleasure of laughing in the face of a humanity destined for catastrophe.

Solar is not a perfect novel. Certain episodes (the pages dedicated to the misunderstanding, by the press, of Beard's words at a conference, with resulting chain reactions that will earn him the reputation of a neo-Nazi) seem tacked onto the main trunk just to elicit some more smirking smiles. At points, the plot diffuses, seems undecided about the path to take, spirals into insignificant flashbacks, and gets lost in superfluous digressions.

Yet, the pleasure of reading remains high on every page, and the novel is devoured in an instant. A great architect of elaborate novelistic mechanisms, an adept acrobat of writing, McEwan is an exceptional artist who manages to make the reader intensely engaged with the fates of characters who are, at best, pathetic and squalid.
One arrives at the end of Solar aware of having witnessed a ruthless highlighting of what is ridiculous, absurd, ephemeral, and grotesque in the theater of human events. Nothing that literature and other arts hadn’t already told us long ago: but still, it is quite something to hear it repeated so violently, in 2010, with the climate catastrophe (perhaps) on the horizon.