Solar

Set over nine years in the early 21st century, the story follows Michael Beard a Nobel prize-winning physicist. We join him in his late fifties, he's more overweight than he hoped to be and his personal life is a mess. He accepts any well paid opportunity to lecture and is the reluctant Head of a new Centre for Renewable Energy. He's in, what he accepts as the closest he's come to, love with his fifth wife Patrice, but she has grown tired of Michael's philandering and found her own fun. On the back of this he accepts an all expenses paid trip to the Arctic and finds himself amongst green activists and artists. Michael's time in the Arctic is humorously depicted and you can feel his irritation at being thrust into a microcosm of people who want to be sociable.

In McEwan's usual style, the story is punctuated by character changing dark twists and turns. And it is the events that happen on Michael's return from the Arctic which lead him to take on a project which is due to save the world via photovoltaics (an energy system based on reconstructing photosynthesis). Furthermore, McEwan has certainly done his physics homework to the point where the reader may feel that they actually learn something new (I did anyway). However, the science doesn't take over the story, but is gives it necessary body and depth, and helps in attempting to understand the work of a climate change physicist in some way.

Throughout Solar, McEwan displays Michael's character brilliantly. Michael is irritable, lazy and a slob; he treats women appallingly. Even when he's at his most physically grotesque he is still wins women over, to the point where they fight over him. You do feel that you shouldn't like Michael, but it's hard not to. And McEwan shows us, in his amazing ability to interlace past and present, why Michael might be as he is - a combination of parental influence and an unfortunate accident. And by the end of Solar, Michael's personal and professional life are mirrored by his lonely, dark and filth covered London flat, left to fester along the years to the point where there is 'so much to do to make the place tolerable that no single task seemed worth the trouble.'

Solar ends abruptly, but a good choice by McEwan. There are a number of routes for Michael, none of which are his preferred choice of sitting alone in a dark bar drinking scotch. Michael's life is chaos and a neat conclusion wouldn't be right. Through Michael, McEwan brilliantly displays the human tendency to procrastinate. How we make commitments to change ourselves and our lifestyles, but ultimately everything gets put off and life just keeps going. Solar raises a fundamental, and topical, point - how we race (or slowly plod) to reverse climate change.