Solar
Author: Ian McEwan
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (March 8, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0307739538
Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar, takes as one of its primary subjects a very contemporary, urgent issue that impinges upon the lives and the consciousness of each of us—no less than our very future as a race, the question of whether or not we will survive the depredations we have inflicted on our environment. The answer, of course, depends on whether or not we are going to stop our mad rush to consume the earth’s resources as though they were to last us forever. On the other hand, compelled perhaps by a certain perverseness in our natures, we persist in continuing those very behaviours that have brought us to our current predicament.
The details of our personal lives—all our pettiest envies and cravings and lusts and regrets—continue to occupy us far more than the question of whether we might be struggling to stay afloat in flood zones or gasping for water in some arid, global-warmed desert, at some not so distant, but nevertheless unimaginable tomorrow. Yet all our obsessiveness does not seem to prevent us from continuing to make the same mistakes in our personal lives that led us to mess them up in the first place.
While it might be too much to say that the narrative in Solar finds its dramatic energy in the tension between the personal and the political, it is certainly true that the novel’s protagonist, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize winning physicist with his best work behind him, frequently experiences some of the most significant (and often hysterically, if blackly funny) events in his life in the space where his personal and his professional lives collide. He is engaged with no less a task than saving the earth and its dwindling resources from the destructive effects of super-consumption, by finding an alternative and environmentally friendly energy source that will also make its sponsors billions of dollars in profits.
On the personal front, Beard is now living through the disintegration of his fifth marriage, an eventuality that he himself has done much—as in about a dozen affairs—to bring about. The best that can be said about Beard, as he himself put it, is that he “is not a complete cad.” Like most self-assessments, his is rather far off the mark, for he is frequently a great deal worse than a cad—he is deceitful, heartless, and at time altogether repulsive. But then he is a man who is incapable of a real and sustained engagement with any other human being. Any kind of giving of himself is beyond him.
But what makes this novel interesting is that Beard is not alone. Almost everybody else around him is equally as self-serving. The women in his life, for instance, are often manipulative and needy. Beard shows them he doesn’t care about them, is dismissive, untruthful, and patronizing—and yet they cluster around him, want his company and attention in bed and out, want to have his baby, move in with him, marry him, reform him—the works. Just as so many women in real life, outside of the limits of feminist theory, so often behave towards apparently the least desirable of men. The novel does slyly pose the eternal nature-nurture question: are we made like this, just as so many men are made to run around and bluster and bully? Are women physicists fewer in number because women are still discouraged in the sciences? Or do we just like life-sciences better because we are women?
The novel’s complex portrayal of women is one of the most engaging features, and it doesn’t bother my feminism at all, because my feminism says that women are fallible human beings who deserve (but seldom get) equal rights and an equal voice, not goddesses whose characterization in fiction must support the fact. The women here are as real as the best fiction can make people—vulnerable, cantankerous, selfish, generous, loving. They are human; and they are not much better than the men.
There is a curious parallel between the novel’s moral vision as expressed in the relations between human beings and the relations between human beings and the earth. McEwan’s characters relate to one another and to their environment in a selfish, exploitative manner—they are users and consumers, not sharers and sustainers. A parable, repeated more than once in the course of the narrative, encapsulates in a sense the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the world where McEwan’s characters dwell: A man quenches his thirst with tree sap, each time destroying a tree in the process, yet looks with suspicion and disbelief at those who try to get him to drink rainwater instead. These people—and, by extension, the real people they are meant to represent—we ourselves—have no conception that different ways of relating to one another and to our environment and its resources can exist. We behave as though we are islands, isolated in space and infinite as to time, each of us so completely intent upon our own immediate gratification that we rarely discover that we needn’t have tried quite so hard. Or been quite so short-sighted.
In a way, therefore, the sun and the energy that it represents form the core of the book in not only the thematic sense, but in a symbolic sense as well. Where Beard, for instance, burns gradually out, the sun remains alive, its fire and generosity undiminished as ever. It burns away the deadwood, and one day it will burn us away as well, if we continue on the destructive path that has suited our short-term interests as human beings so well—a sort of belief system according to which we act as though the earth and her riches are some inexhaustible box of toys left for our diversion by an endlessly indulgent parent. We can pull out and play with and suck at and throw and break as many as we will for as long as it pleases us, and there will always be more goodies where the others came from.
For all the novel’s ambiguity of tone, the final vision remains bleak: we may have missed our chance at renewal, and at life altogether. To the planet as a whole, that failure is a matter of indifference; to angels, perhaps cause for mourning, but to a writer, our human blunders, however doomed, provide the material for the dark humour that lights up this richly textured novel.
Pubali Ray Chaudhuri is an Associate Editor of Intrepid Report.
