Ian McEwan’s Solar is darkly comic, interesting and absorbing in parts, but overall a bit unfulfilling unless seen as a warning against selfish egoistic behaviour. However, the main problem is that the life unravelling ending is just a little dull compared to the madness of earlier sections of the book as it struggles to find the fever pitch it’s striving for.
Solar traces three significant periods in the life of environmental scientist, Nobel prize winning physicist and professor, Michael Beard, as he flicks from self created life disaster to self created life disaster. Visiting the man and his life in 2000, 2005 and 2009, the book is a bit like Dickens’ tale of past, present and future but without the phantasms to liven things up with.
Apart from his pseudo-addiction to crisps, his biggest transgression in life is his womanising ways, with a raft of ex-wives and a trail of unfaithful relationships. This inevitably spins out of control and leads on to even more disaster for Beard as he goes to cover his tracks from the aftermath of his philandering. The books starts out with Beard managing to cheat on his fifth wife, Patrice, and in all fairness he doesn’t get any better from that point on.
Everything the character does is completely self serving, without a trace of empathy or thought for others. He manoeuvres to position himself for his own gains, completely oblivious to the thoughts, feelings or lives of others. However, because the character learns nothing whatsoever about himself there’s an empty feeling of disappointment at the end of the book, missing out on the possibility of pathos.
While Ian McEwan’s Solar is a lot of fun in parts to read, especially Beard’s trip to the arctic, it just doesn’t do enough to win you over by the end. The style of the book is one of moral questions, with ironic indifference for answers, but the irony is not quite loaded as well as it could have been, and the culmination not quite so “savagely funny” as it perhaps should have been.
Solar by Ian McEwan review: 3.2/5
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