By Ian McEwan
An engrossing, satirical and intensely humorous new novel on weather change.
Michael Beard is in his past due fifties; bald, obese, unprepossessing — a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose most sensible paintings is at the back of him. buying and selling on his popularity, he speaks for huge charges, lends his identify to the letterheads of well known clinical associations and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling worldwide warming. An inveterate philanderer, Beard reveals his 5th marriage floundering. yet this time it really is diversified: she is having the affair, and he's nonetheless in love with her.
When Beard's expert and private worlds are entwined in a freak coincidence, a chance provides itself, an opportunity for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his occupation and extremely in all likelihood shop the area from environmental disaster.
With an international scope, Solar is a comedy dealing at once with the crises of at the present time. a narrative of 1 man's goals and self-deceptions, it's a startling and fashionable new departure within the paintings of 1 of the world's nice writers.
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Sample text
Watched intently by the other two, Beard was staring at the centrepiece, a thick column containing a mess of lines and cutaways that resolved at last into a quadruple helix making one complete turn, and at the base, in less detail, a boxy representation of a generator. One of the doodles showed a roofline, with a TV aerial and the helix set on a short vertical pole strapped to the side of a chimney – not a good mounting at all. For two minutes he stared in silence. ’ Braby said. ‘Well,’ Beard muttered.
Reflecting on the night before, he found it extraordinary that after a lifetime of infidelities, a night with an imaginary friend was no less exciting. For the first time in weeks he felt faintly cheerful, even whistled a show tune as he microwaved his supper, and when he saw himself in the gold-leaf sunking mirror in the cloakroom downstairs, thought his face had lost some fat and looked purposeful, with a shadow of cheekbone visible, and was, by the light of the thirty-watt bulb, somewhat noble, a possible effect of the sugary cholesterol-lowering yoghurt drink he was forcing himself to swallow each morning.
He kept this going for five minutes, his voice, then the woman’s, sometimes artfully overlapping the two. The house was silent, listening, of course. He went into the bathroom, ran a tap, flushed the lavatory and laughed out loud. Patrice should know that his lover was a wit. Then he gave out a muted kind of whoop. Patrice should know he was having fun. He did not sleep much that night. At four, after a long silence suggestive of tranquil intimacy, he opened his bedroom door while keeping up an insistent murmur, and went down the stairs backwards, bending forward to beat out on the treads with his palms the sound of his companion’s footfall, syncopated with his own.