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Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement, this “totally gripping and entirely hilarious” novel (The Wall Street Journal) traces the arc of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s ambitions and self-deception. Dr. Michael Beard’s 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 halfheartedly heads a government- backed initiative tackling global warming. Meanwhile, Michael’s fifth marriage is floundering due to his incessant womanizing. When his professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Michael to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and save the world from environmental disaster. But can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity? Read more
Publisher : Anchor
Publication date : March 8, 2011
Edition : Reprint
Language : English
Print length : 332 pages
ISBN-10 : 0307739538
ISBN-13 : 37
Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
Dimensions : 5.2 x 0.72 x 7.9 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #473,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #490 in Dark Humor #1,524 in Fiction Satire
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Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Kindle
Prior to "Solar," I was not familiar with this author. I bought the book based on the strength of the reviews and the free Kindle sample. The story was comic and compelling. The good reviews left by other readers are excellent. I'm not going to bother repeating them. However, unlike the other reviewers, I did not find the protagonist repelling. Rather, the character Michael Beard allows the reader to explore this question: "What if you were truly a scientific genius, yet found it completely rational to see every opportunity to act upon a personal impulse as reasonable and good?" Indeed, many of his actions were repulsive, but I think the differences between Beard and each of us are differences of degree, not kind. How often have each of us done something we know was selfish, and had the potential to hurt someone we loved, yet we rationalized it as somehow acceptable. Through Beard, McEwan holds up a mirror to the reader, and asks us to identify the parts of this bad man we find within ourselves. [I liked the ending, too!]
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Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2010 by Dan S.
Despite the book's cover photo of the sun, the jacket blurb, and a few publicity sound bites, this isn't remotely a book about global warming or solar power. Rather, it's a character study that in McEwan's mind speaks volumes about the human difficulty of dealing with comprehensive, global problems such as a warming planet and melting ice caps. All this in the person of Michael Beard, a sixty-something PhD and a decades-earlier winner of a Nobel prize in physics, for the Beard-Einstein Conflation - a literary/scientific invention I won't attempt to explain here. Beard is revered in academic circles, and he's managed to live off his fame and reputation - both slowly eroding until his connection to the murder of his fifth wife's lover very nearly plunges Beard's life into the social gutter altogether. But Beard has the survival instincts of a cockroach. The opportunist in him sees a professional resurrection in a project intended to make hay of sunshine, i.e., a method of collecting sun energy and turning it into a more usable energy for humans by processing the energy of photons - particles (or waves) of light - in a new way. He has no real interest in this scheme, other than that of personal aggrandizement, but he wades into it as if it were the cause of his lifetime. He visits a polar expedition to survey the melting ice cap, only to nearly freeze his penis while taking a whizz in sub-zero temperatures. Later, yin meets yang as he soldiers across the U.S.'s Southwest and through its benumbing heat only to face legal action over his solar scheme. Along the way, and finally wary of marriage, Michael takes up with a colleague, Melissa. Her biological clock is ticking - she quits her birth control pills, and the eternally horny physicist becomes, against his wishes, the father of a girl, Catriona. But Michael, ever the peripatetic lover, ends up in bed with an American waitress (sorry, Tiger), named Darlene, promising her in the midst of coitus that he will marry her. How does Michel extract himself from legal action over his solar project, as well as the magnified rage of dual spurned lovers? It's a finale to make Anton Chekov proud, and I won't spoil its impact for you here. It may sound as though I'm perhaps sordidly enamored of McEwan's story, and that isn't a bad evaluation of this my first reading of Solar. However, there are things I don't care for about the story. There's a problem all writers face - no matter how inventive their story-telling skills - and that's the tandem of complacency and predictability. Once a writer has success with a particular style and structure, the tendency is to remain with it. McEwan's stylistic trademark is his narrative. His prose isn't pedestrian, but neither is it particularly eloquent. What has worked about his style has been, in my mind, the strength of his characterizations, the occasional sizzle of dialogue, a gifted wit, and a strong sense of history in both characterization and story. After all, the only relevance in reading fiction in an age of compulsory "reality" is the significance of history's impact on a fiction writer's characters. With so much going for McEwan behind the scenes, we - this reader, at least - tend to bless his preoccupation with narrative as if it were his forte. Surely McEwan thinks it is. But since modernity (the version we associate with fiction), writers from James Joyce to Oates, Roth and Franzen have had to cope with the impact of visual arts on literature. In recent decades, this means cinema. Thus, writers have had to create ever more transparent narrators in order to present a more cinematic literature. The advantage to readers of such transparency has been to invite them more intimately into the story, the history, the characters. And this in turn has allowed readers to engage fiction's characters in both their outer and inner lives. With the advent of the public-at-large's preoccupation with counseling, self-help, and psychological insight, we readers can now use characterization to mirror our own demons, our own emotional ups and downs. But McEwan, in such an age, requires us to "filter" such fictive experience though his narrators. He's an astute observer of human quirks and foibles - he may very well have become a successful comedian - and as he speaks through his narrator he gives us imminently memorable psychological insights. But the problem of such emphasis on the narrator deprives readers of the intimacy we're all used to in experiencing both the linearity of story and the depth of meaning behind it. True, McEwan's insights into human behavior are near-impeccable - one might argue that a reader would never realize the human condition McEwan's narrators present so facilely. But this is too much like the doting parent who hovers too closely, depriving children of both the scars and successes of personal experience. In such hands, readers and children are led - they don't learn. But enough of that - McEwan's all-too-consistent narrative style in the face of diminishing tension and predictable story structure will remain forgiven, at least for a few more books. Still, Solar will be panned in some reviews for reasons McEwan is surely aware of. And perhaps he'll be delighted by such dissing. First, many will be disappointed that Michael Beard, McEwan's protagonist, is such a louse. He's a serial womanizer - inside and outside marriage. He's a slovenly beast, something of a caricature of the sloppy, unkempt academic that seems to live only in the mind. He cares little about his looks, drinks too much, eats too much, and seems to have no rheostats on his manifold appetites. We yearn for heroes these days - to the point of naming everyone in a uniform from Little League on up a hero. But I suspect McEwan persists in his anti-heroic writing to remind us that, outside of accidents of fate, heroes are made - by facing their weaknesses and demons - not born of ideological posturing. And where academics are supposed to be paragons of reason - a condition that's supposed to give them a healthy moral compass - Beard is completely amoral, as best we can judge - a complete victim of his senses. The implication here is a complaint against rationality of some long standing: that reason and mental prowess isn't, in the postmodern world, always a tool for the perpetuation of a healthy society. Reason, we learn, can be a weapon of the paranoid-schizophrenic as well as an implement of a person of monumental wisdom. Finally - and certainly most provocatively - McEwan becomes an equal opportunity social critic in Solar by tweaking the postmodern world's ugliest dog - that of political correctness. I won't give examples, but it seems safe enough to say that while his womanizing is indicative of his attitudes toward women, he occasionally speaks truth when faced with the pragmatisms of gender issues.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2010 by Gridley
There are moments in _Solar_ that are brilliantly good fun. There is a horrifically delicious slapstick scene in which Beard confronts one of his wife's lovers. There are wickedly amusing satires of earnest do-gooders, of academic humanists, of egomaniacal scientists, of women who want to "save" the man in their lives. _Solar_ could have been a straight up satire of the pretensions of the intellectual set, like Kingsley Amis's _Lucky Jim_. And yet the novel is not 100% satire, nor does it seem strongly committed to being a volume of amusing vignettes themed around the life of Michael Beard, Nobel Prize winner and man of uncontrolled appetites, and the impending crisis of global warming descending on a planet populated by people with uncontrolled appetites. And it is this novel's inability to commit to either satire or seriousness that ultimately makes it less than fully satisfying. As a corollary, the novel seems uncertain whether it wants global warming to be a major theme or just sexy, topical backdrop that will make for sexy marketing. There are times where it seems like this is going to be a moral tale of a man receiving his come-uppance for all the people whose lives he has blithely ruined (or at least worsened), for his excessive appetites, for his thoughtless immorality (up to and including framing someone for a serious crime and theft of valuable intellectual property). He seems constantly on the verge of crisis. And the book seems like it might be building toward such a climax. But...no. No. Crescendo to nothing. Not a big confrontation and then the screen goes black before we know the ultimate outcome. Not a delicious postmodern refusal to provide closure. Instead, it was more like a dissipation of energy. There are also a few times where it seems like this might be a book about a character's personal evolution. We see a morally flawed character in middle age grappling with what his life has amounted to and whether he wants to change--and, if so, whether he is capable of changing. This is territory Phillip Roth handles with great dexterity, and I was interested to see what McEwan might do with such a scenario. But not happening. What's surprising about this is that the best of McEwan has exactly the kind of follow-through this book lacks. _Amsterdam_--we get that very darkly comic finale. _Atonement_--a devastating ending that shows McEwan's craft at its best. This book is still definitely worth reading. It's McEwan, and there are passages that you want to read out loud to a friend immediately. But if I had to pick one or two McEwan books to recommend to a friend, this would not be among them.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2010 by Rebecca Carpenter
This genious' latest lacks the sheer brilliance and body-slam emotional impact of Chesil Beach and Atonement, but still well worth a 5. The first third of the novel (2000) is hilarious; the next 2 parts (2005, 2009) focus on the protagonist's death spiral, resulting from his covering up the accidental death of a physics protege, whose ideas he later steals, laying blame for the feigned murder on another sexually involved with his 5th wife; and then, seeing where the money lies, reverts from a global warming skeptic to the "savior of the planet". It would take a re-read to list more of the subtle ironies here, but I was immediately amused by two. Beard's escape from a hungry charge from a "vanishing" polar bear in the Arctic, is immediately followed by one of his wife's lovers offing himself by slipping on a polar bear rug, thereby launching his new Save the Planet career; the other involves the apparently new energy discovery involving a reversal of the process of photosynthesis (whereby plants convert CO2 to oxygen) to store the newely created energy in fuel cells. (As I read it, being neither a chemist nor physicist) I think McEwan had an actor in mind all along, after the success of Atonement. Picture, say, Danny DeVito complete with sliderule, bag of Viagra and lobster bib, and you've got our "hero". A well-deserved twist of the nose to the Green/Greed/Grant set. More believeable in its plotline than Crichton's State of Fear, though with the same warning: Beware the Green Gestapo!
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Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2010 by Will Baker
Format: Paperback
What does a self-pitying, fiftyish, overweight, balding, Nobel Laureate physicist do once he's past his prime? Well, if you're Michael Beard, the protagonist of "Solar", you can lie abed and achieve a kind of solitary rapture by eating loads of ice cream and masturbating while your wife betrays you with another man. You can witness the accidental death of one of your graduate students, steal his ideas about solar energy, and frame another man for the student's demise. After all, he was balling your current wife too -- she's the fifth -- and you owe nobody anything. You can do all this in England but achieve your apotheosis at an experimental solar panel site in a remote corner of New Mexico. I happen to live in that remote corner and Ian McEwan certainly got his geography right. I gather that his physics are sound as well. Anyway, the jubilee comes to a crashing halt at the end and the reader is left somewhere in the neighborhood of the hero, about to be assaulted by two women in a shabby motel room, with everything left hanging. Other reviews have criticized the nature of the principal character but though he has his faults -- and they're pretty nasty ones -- he's also smart and self confident. And, after all, we must cut him some slack. In physics, when you're fifty or so, you're not only over the hill, you're WAY over the hill. Physicists' careers don't follow the same trajectory as that of Grand Masters who can play tournament-level chess into their 80s. It sounds rather dismal, I know, but underneath it all, it's actually quite funny in a very understated and British way. It reminded me a little of "The Ginger Man", not in style but in its general deadpan perspective on human nature. (There are few grace notes in the prose.) I'll give just two examples of the comedy, one subtle and the other obvious. Before boarding his train, Beard buys a package of potato chips ("crisps") and looks forward to some self indulgence as he bundles his luggage into the racks and sits down at a table across from a young man in punk garb. Beard gazes with eager anticipation at the package of potato chips on the table. The man across from him reaches forward and rips open the pack. Shocked, Beard stares at him, extracts a few chips and begins to chew. The other man does the same. This silent contest continues until Beard detrains, at which point he discovers his own bag of chips in his overcoat pocket. Example two. Beard is on some arctic expedition that requires multiple bulky layers of clothing in a climate where the temperature is 20 degrees below zero. Half way to his destination he has to pull his snowmobile over and relieve himself, removing both pairs of gloves and struggling to open his zippers before his fingers freeze. His fingers don't freeze but his penis sticks to one of the zippers and he must pour brandy over it to free it. However, his penis is not only white but bone white, like a Christmas tree ornament. He tucks himself back into his clothing and mounts his snowmobile. He hears something in his lap crack. As he bounces along, he's able to feel an ice-cold cylindrical object wriggling down the inside of his trousers. He gives this development a good deal of thought before he reaches a point at which he can remove his clothing and find out what it is. I'll leave it at that. It's not a very long book and I found it to be very amusing at time, with some pathos mixed in. There is an extensive section of acknowledgements, unusual in a novel, that includes physicists and cites some of the professional literature.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2013 by Steven Daedalus
Format: Kindle
This is a very funny send-up of the global warming cult in particular and government-dependent scientific research in general. Many Amazon reviewers seem to want to distance themselves from the main character, opportunist-physicist Michael Beard who, as he himself says, has enjoyed a free ride ever since he won a Nobel prize. He is a cad, certainly, but a very amiable and human one and most of his wives and lovers share his selfish weaknesses---even his mother whose deathbed confession of 17 affairs in five years wins his (and our) admiration. If anyone is in need of sympathy, it's his four-year-old daughter, the only innocent in the tale. But she shares his hearty approach to life and one suspects she will turn out all right, enriched by memory of her father, the Expanding Universe, as her mother calls him in his final 65-pounds-overweight incarnation. I enjoyed Atonement and Enduring Love. But neither prepared me for this hilarious hoot whose only real sadness is saved for the final page. Thank you, Mr. McEwan.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2015 by DickStanley
Thank God I'm done with this book. It was supposed to get better, that's why I kept going. The characters held such promise, but never changed. The science was always just around the next bend, but the road curved till the end. Like a movie that is so bad you think it will get better. Well, it never got better. This McEwan was written for someone other than me. Someone who loves an endless character study of one individual who never changes (why study a static character?). Someone who appreciates skipping years at a time and then spending page after page telling the story about the skipped years (something artistic there I'm sure, just like a donut hole exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art). Someone who reads science fiction but abhors the "science" part of the fiction. In short, after battling to get this book on my Kindle, emailing the author (he is a rather nice fellow, and I do like him personally) I now know why his publisher refused to release this to Kindle immediately. It's a bad book. For those who think me unfair because I didn't like Dr. Beard, you're wrong. He is a character. He is drawn as a modern day scientist of the Wall Street mold. The character is unlikeable, but so what. The fact is, this was a boring read.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2010 by JL Price in Florida
While I've not read everything Ian McEwan has written, I've read enough to have pre-ordered Solar. It is distinctly different from Atonement, On Chesil Beach or Enduring Love, in that there is no attempt at developing emotional empathy in the reader for any of the characters in the book, least of all Michael Beard, the Nobel Laureate and serial philanderer, who, as the story opens, is falling apart from the knowledge that his fifth wife is having an affair. Michael has coasted on his Nobel for a good number of years, and as his history unfolds, he is revealed as never having outgrown pre-adolescent tendencies towards self-gratification in any number of situations; rationalizing everything that he does, and then compartmentalizing his misdeeds and continuing to coast and then to capitalize on his then aggrandized laurels. While this plot could have been set in any number of industries, that Mr. McEwan chose the world of science at the Nobel level makes the book, on the one hand, less approachable, while at the same time, more interesting, as Michael Beard is driven in his early years by a pure love of science and a great sense of superiority of science over all other disciplines, which intensity is transformed by his Nobel into a superiority and near infallibility (in his own mind) by which he minimally rationalizes and justifies his self-indulgent actions. While the scientific setting makes this book a little tougher to initially absorb the reader, the satire of academia, the scientific community, the never-ending battle of the sexes, and the LOL hilarity of some of Michael's behaviors, make this book a very enjoyable read. My disappointment then, is only that after the great build-up to the climax of the book, all is resolved (if one can really call it a resolution) in a page and a half, and there is virtually no denouement to sate the reader who has made it through to the end. As ever, Mr. McEwan's language skills are extraordinary!
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Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2010 by Avid Reader