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Product Details
| Release Date: | 2010-03-30 |
| Edition: | 1St Edition |
| Number of Pages: | 304 |
| Category: | Hardcover |
| Number of Items: | 1 |
| ISBN: | 0385533411 |
| Label/Manufacturer: | Nan A. Talese |
Product Description
The literary event of the season: a new novel from Ian McEwan, as surprising as it is masterful.Michael Beard is a Nobel prize–winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. While he coasts along in his professional life, Michael’s personal life is another matter entirely. His fifth marriage is crumbling under the weight of his infidelities. But this time the tables are turned: His wife is having an affair, and Michael realizes he is still in love with her.
When Michael’s personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster. Can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity?
A complex novel that brilliantly traces the arc of one man’s ambitions and self-deceptions, Solar is a startling, witty, and stylish new work from one of the world’s great writers.
Product Features
* ISBN13: 9780385533416* Condition: New
* Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Customer Reviews
Rated
on 2010-08-27maybe it was the verbose narrating or the main character, michael beard, but something was off for me... i made it through 120 pages and decided it wasn't worth my time. ian mcewan may be brilliant, but i missed it.
Rated
on 2010-08-22Michael Beard, a 53 year old physicist with a Nobel prize for his work on the `Beard-Einstein Conflation' in quantum physics, is past his prime. Overweight, in his fifth failed marriage, his career stalling, he is also out of sympathy with the scientific momentum on global warming - he finds all the earnest talk of the `planet in peril' too `Old Testament'.
But redemption may be at hand through the work of one of the enthusiastic post-doctoral advocates of artificial solar photosynthesis at the National Centre for Renewable Energy which Beard heads. Alas, things start to go wrong - the project hits economic, technical and intellectual property snags, and it is buffeted by the resurgence of global warming denialism.
Beard's failed romantic past also returns to haunt him in the form of an obsessive, delusional house-builder who had been having an affair with Beard's wife and has since been released from prison where he had been stewing for eight years after being framed by Beard to avoid Beard being presumed guilty for the death of the solar-impassioned post-doc who had also been having an affair with Beard's wife but who had accidentally slipped on a polar bear skin rug and died from a head injury during a confrontation with Beard.
Will the builder extract revenge? Will true love finally find a way for Michael Beard? Will Beard's company, Concentrated Solar Power, conquer the renewables market and save the planet? Who cares - alas, this is the answer, for this first novel to take global warming as its theme, by a major Booker-winning British author, is as noxious as a dirty coal-fired power station.
Although it is a page-turner, the motivation is more to discover what literary oil-slicks the coming pages hold. Plot implausibilities. Clumping, wooden dialogue. The science content clumsily grafted onto the love (or, more often, soap opera) interest (caught in the post-coital act of infidelity with Beard's wife, the solar-impassioned post-doc launches into a highly improbable disquisition on quantum coherence in photosynthesis).
The science rarely rises above tick-boxing of exotic lists (superstrings, hetrotic strings, M-theory, the `delightful intricacies of calabi-Yau manifolds and orbifolds'), stilted exposition of quantum theory and one stale joke (the string theorist caught in bed with another woman who exclaims to his wife, `Darling, I can explain everything!').
Politically, the quality is no better. Beard publicly airs his views that women's brains do not fit them as well as men's brains for engineering and physics, provoking protests which McEwan dismissively lampoons as a witch-hunt by `politically-correct' ideologues. Fanned by McEwan, the aroma of burning martyr is strong. So, to match the `Beard-Einstein Conflation' we now have what could be termed the `Beard-McEwan Conflation' which conflates feminism with `political correctness' and postmodernism in a defence of biological determinism.
The environmental politics are also abysmal. McEwan's sympathies are with carbon trading schemes and other market `solutions' to global warming, which are claimed to not only solve the environmental problem but, as Beard enthuses, make "very large sums of money, staggering sums" for their entrepreneurs. In the end, Beard, and his creator, settle comfortably on nuclear energy as the fall-back solution. "Was not the 28-kilometre exclusion zone around Chernobyl now the biologically richest and most diverse region of Central Europe", concludes Beard in a bold brief for the benefits of nuclear radiation.
If Solar is representative of contemporary literature, then give me Dickens.
Rated
on 2010-08-22Rarely do I laugh out loud reading a book. But parts of Solar made me do that. The account of the snowmobile trip, in particular. (I won't spoil it by giving any details.) A book that makes me laugh out loud would normally get raves from me.
But Solar gets dinged by me for seeming to degenerate from comedy into farce. The ending, for example, bothered me. It seemed contrived and unlikely. As the book went on, the author Ian McEwan went from effortlessly portraying a flawed, but likable, scientist to forcing a idiotic buffoon onto the reader.
The subject of the book -- climate change -- is certainly timely. Ian McEwan's insights on that were interesting to read. He did a better job of weaving them into a novel than did, for example, Michael Crichton in State of Fear.
So there was lots to like in this book. I can see why others did enjoy it. And I'm not disappointed that I read it. But I didn't like it much, and so do not recommend it.
Rated
on 2010-08-17The latest novel by Ian McEwan once again did not disappoint. While the reviews have been mixed, I found the novel richly entertaining for several reasons. Unlike many reviewers, I found the pace evenly maintained and McEwan maintains dramatic tension over the course of this novel right through the ending pages. The novel deals with the complex issues around the science and politics of climate change, and at its heart has a self-absorbed and boorish scientist who is brilliant at rationalizing the whole world, and his own selfish world view. As undeserving of redemption as his character Michael Beard may appear to the readers, the depiction is wholly credible--and perhaps too close to comfort--for some of us. The only reason I didn't give this review five stars is because the other characters in the book, and especially his ex-wives, are left as unexplored and uni-dimensional characters, something that would have added greater depth and richness to the narrative. But perhaps this was intended, as the novel reflects Michael Beard's self-absorbed worldview even if its in the third person, and in which there is little room for self-awareness or anyone else in his life. Overall, an enjoyable read and another insightful exploration of self-absorption and single-minded ambition by McEwan.
Rated
on 2010-08-16Usually - if such a word can be applied to rare events - Nobel Laureates are recognised towards the end of a lifetime's achievement. The true significance of work has to be established before it can be recognised. Michael Beard, modifier of Einstein's photovoltaics, producer of the Beard-Einstein Conflation, or should that have been the Einstein-Beard Conflation, seemed to receive his ultimate recognition a tad early in life. Surely it would have been the proposed grand application of his work that swayed the judges rather than the mere realisation of theory. So if there is to be a criticism of Ian McEwan's novel, Solar, it is precisely this. But then Michael Beard always was a precocious winner, after coming first in a beautiful baby award. So there.
This is my only criticism of Solar. I thought that Ian McEwan would never write anything to challenge the intensity, complexity, ease of expression and irony of Saturday. But Solar achieves all of this and much more.
In his professional life, Michael Beard is a scientist, a physicist with an interest in light. Energy becomes his focus and, via his photovoltaic conflation, he begins to address energy production for a warming planet. Or does he? Does he receive rather than initiate? And does he acknowledge?
Both meticulous and precise in his professional guise, Michael Beard is a sybaritic, lecherous slob in the private domain. We meet him first upon his fifth wife, Patrice. With her he has at last found happiness - at least when they are together. Periods apart find him pursuing anything available before or after a half a bottle of Scotch. Unknown to him, Patrice is doing precisely the same, but remaining sober. From Michael Beard's conventionally misogynist standpoint, this seems unfair and he calls foul.
Aldous is just the sort of bloke that - all things being equal (which of course they are not!) - Michael Beard would both ignore and avoid. He's big, hefty, wears sandals and a pony tail. His apparently laid back approach to life is surely anathema to Michael Beard's internally perceived order. After all, didn't a youthful Beard sport a jacket and tie with pens in the top pocket right through the 1960s? How times change, he might reflect, on pushing aside a pile of unwashed dishes mixed with general detritus in his London flat. But besides threatening, Aldous is also brilliant. He is a young post-doc recruited to assist Michael's research. And then there's Tarpin, a builder decidedly not of the same social class as the venerable academic. Things come together at the end of the book's first part. Suffice it to say that Michael Beard's involuntary circumcision at the hands of frost while taking a leak somewhere near Spitzbergen might just have been Mother Nature getting her own back, her feminist equaliser before the stronger opposition has even scored.
Unfortunately for Michael Beard, however, his tendency to spread himself too thinly provokes the termination of his Government-sponsored energy research. The director, Braby, sacks him, an act that injures pride. Michael internalises the rejection not as a failure but as an opportunity, given his multiple avenues of interest. How can it offend him? He's won a Nobel Prize. Can't he do precisely what he wants, even beyond criticism?
Beard is confronted with alternative views of both life and the universe. Everything follows. Later he is apparently committed to just one woman, Melissa, but without marriage, mutually-agreed. But he is constantly pulled elsewhere. His logical-positivist assumptions are questioned, both at home and abroad. People can lie, deconstruct, reconstruct. So can he. The only consistency in his personal life is its inconsistency, constantly inconsistent. But his professional assumptions are questioned by social constructivism, by phenomenological attack on the universality he assumes. The consequence is an irrational but wholly real reconstruction of a reality he thought he had both defined and described. His method of coping is enigmatic and inventive, but its public expression is totally uncontrolled, misconceived.
Michael's research points to a breakthrough in energy production. He can split water using sunlight and catalysts that promote artificial photosynthesis. He can truly harness the sun. Perhaps it vies for the centre of his universe. The results can burn carbon-free to power the world. His new daughter calls him a saviour. But his business brain shares his scientific nodes. He has patents. He hires Hammer to deal with detail, a task he accomplishes supremely until just before the scheduled switch on of the prototype in the New Mexico desert. The rest is history.
Solar presents a multiplicity of themes. But I think its main plank is an age-old conundrum. In an address presenting the Nobel Prize to Beard, a professor refers to Feynman's illustration of the elegance of Beard's Conflation. Tangled, knotted strings that dancers further complicate can, under the right conditions, with the right foresight, fall to a simple untangled simplicity with a single tug. Thus Beard had taken a knotted intellectual theory and let it fall free of its complications.
In his private life, however, Beard truly found complication. What was simple he knotted by quirk, by over-indulgence, by ill-discipline and by visceral opportunity. If the beautiful but independently-minded Melissa was temporarily unavailable across an ocean that provided the vacuum, then the fiftyish, flabby Darlene, a waitress in a New Mexico diner, provided the pressure. But she took her temporary role seriously, an attitude that Michael Beard never expected.
No matter how complicated our lives become, no matter how intertwined, no matter how independently we present identity, career, research or discovery, ultimately they all reduce to a simple cocktail of body fluids, desires - usually only partly fulfilled - and ultimately a resort to self-preservation, a fundamental state that can be obscured by our relentless pursuit of receding detail. Thus Ian McEwan presents a contrast between potentially enduring rationality that seeks out permanence and base, immediate desire driven by instincts we cannot even recognise, let alone control. At the last, it is illusory permanence that presents the true delusion. And what about constancy and the enduringly rational? Ask me tomorrow.
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