“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. Continue reading
