Solar

So many novels depict the emotional unraveling of writers (certainly based on them following the dictum "write what you know") that it was refreshing to read Ian McEwan's Solar, which chronicles the downward spiral of a Nobel Prize winner in physics. McEwan, that rara avis in the book world--a popular literary novelist--has created a man who is both comically hapless and pathetically tragic, as he may have the secret to the global warming crisis if he can only stay out of his own way.

"He belonged to that class of men--vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever--who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue. But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken. His fifth marriage was disintegrating, and he should have known how to behave, how to take the long view, how to take blame."

So begins the tale of Michael Beard, British Nobel laureate, who is consumed with how to keep his fifth wife. Though he is a chronic adulterer, he's stunned by his wife's decision to use that knowledge and begin her own affair with a loutish handyman, which sends Beard into a tailspin that has him faking having a girlfriend of his own.

This is Beard in 2000--the book contains three parts, visiting him again in 2005 and 2009. The first part includes a lively comic interlude where he visits the Arctic Circle, being chased by a polar bear and thinking he has frozen his penis off. A polar bear rug will then play a part in a darkly tragic sequence that I dare not spoil here, but will come back to haunt Beard as he is poised, in the last part, to perhaps solving the energy crisis and reversing global warming.

This is third McEwan novel I've read, and if it's not as richly conceived as Atonement or as white-knuckled as Saturday, it has its charms. Beard is a masterful creation, arrogant and insecure, a roly-poly cocksman. McEwan seems to have done a lot of research in the science involved, and can't disguise his belief, through his protagonist, that global warming is real and man-made.

I did, though, at times become exasperated with Beard and had to read this is smaller chunks than I might have otherwise, as he wears a reader out. Clues are dropped about his eventual downfall, and there's grim humor in it but not much pleasure.

But McEwan is a master stylist. Consider this passage, with Beard circling a London airport, late for a speech: "He was gazing east, through a great rim of ginger grime--it could have been detached from an unwashed bathtub and suspended in the air. He was looking past the City, down the bulging, widening Thames, past oil and gas storage tanks toward the brown flatlands of Kent and Essex and the scene of his childhood and the outsized hospital where his mother had died, not long after she told him of her secret life, and beyond, the open jaw of the tidal estuary and the North Sea, an unwrinkled nursery blue in the February sunshine."