“How do we engage with global issues like climate change, AIDs and poverty when we’re so inept at managing ourselves?” This is a question Ryan Roberts posed to Ian McEwan during an interview in London on 12th June 2008 , conducted for the book ‘Conversations with Ian McEwan’.
McEwan responded by saying that he sees cause for hope despite the huge challenges facing the planet but this means we have to think outside the box and modify our inclination for selfishness and short-termism. We have to start “doing favors for unborn people” he said.
This question was prompted with reference to McEwan’s essay about his experiences on an expedition to the Artic with Cape Farewell in February 2005. That trip to Spitsbergen was, as he confirms in the acknowledgements, the starting point to the novel, Solar.
The novel’s central character Michael Beard, is a Nobel Prize winning scientist who wants to do something about climate change but is constantly thrown off track by his own weaknesses and faults.
At the start of the novel (in 2000), he is in the middle of the wreckage of his fifth marriage. Beard, we soon learn, has an insatiable appetite for fattening food, good wine and fine women.
His obsessive womanizing borders on sex addiction. However fulfilling a relationship is, he finds it impossible to remain faithful and cannot resist the temptations of the flesh.
In the opening lines of the novel he is described as “a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic , mathematic, stricken”. I confess that I had to look up the adjective ‘anhedonic’ , and found that it derives from the word ‘anhedonia’, meaning “an inability to experience pleasure”. This actually directly contradicts a later description of Beard as man who takes his pleasures seriously.
This inconsistency is one of the major weakness of the novel which is not one of McEwan’s best. He seems unsure whether Beard should be a bumbling buffoon (“a dedicated sower of unconscious disorder”), loveable rogue or a serious, yet deeply flawed academic. In essence he is all three and the consequence is that he is only capable of taking the short view of the world; no small problem when the future of the planet is at stake.
His Nobel Prize allows him to convince eligible women that he was a “genius in need of rescuing” but having achieved this award at a relatively early age he has rested on hs laurels and done little of substance since. As a result he has become more of a bureaucrat than a working scientist.
In the course of the novel he finds a mission more by accident than design; effectively stealing a young protégé’s blueprint for using clean energy from artificial photosynthesis on an industrial scale.
In taking on the climate change theme, McEwan is good at highlighting the hypocrisy behind organisations who claim to have a Green agenda. For example, when Beard is invited to an Artic fact finding trip it is his presence alone that is required and we are told that “the foundation would bear all the expenses, while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venuzuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed”.
If there more savage irony like this, the novel would have been far more powerful. Instead, McEwan gets distracted by the farcical antics of the main character and the satire turns towards Beard’s chauvinism and political naivety. At one point, Beard is described as “A fat man who restlessly craved the attention of beautiful women who could cook”.
Beard’s messed up life becomes the chief focus so it becomes a novel of personal rather than planetary stupidity. In the end, McEwan is reduced to ponderous descriptions like :“The old parliament of his selfhood was in uproarious division”.
The moral of the tale can be summed up by the phrase “greed trumps virtue” which doesn’t exactly allow much cause for optimism.
Ian McEwan rightly believes that it is logic, not idealism, which will ultimately determine the future of humankind. This novel is,as such, a missed opportunity because we must address the issue of climate change in a more serious manner than this disjointed and disappointing novel.
Related links:
Ian McEwan interviewed by Ryan Roberts (PDF file)
A Boot Room In The Frozen North (Essay by McEwan about his trip to Spitsbergen)
How Artificial Photosynthesis Works (How Stuff Works)
