Solar
Climate fiction as farce in Ian McEwan's novel
This is the sixteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Ian McEwan’s satirical novel about the climate crisis, Solar.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
Ian McEwan’s Solar is one of the most high-profile literary examples of cli-fi. What is strange about the novel, however, is that it turns the entire climate change subject into a long-winded, sick joke. The protagonist of Solar is Michael Beard, a Nobel laureate-theoretical physicist who is also one of the most despicable and dislikable characters in twenty-first century fiction. A drunk, schlubby, conniving womanizer and misogynist, Beard’s claim to prize-winning fame is tacking on a little update to Einstein’s theory of relativity, known as the “Einstein-Beard Conflation.” Since this stroke of scholarship, Beard has gone through five marriages and taken a position as a figurehead “director” of a research institute in the UK. The novel is a triptych, taking place over three sections set in 2000, 2005, and 2009, tracking Beard’s spiral into further depravity even as he stumbles toward a project which promotes clean solar energy in Arizona. The only problem, besides his frequent infidelities, is that he plagiarized the solar technology from a staffer who had an affair with his wife—and also happened to die in freak accident.
McEwan quite unsubtly frames Beard as a metaphor for humanity. Just as civilization can’t quite make the jump to clean energy, Beard is utterly incapable of changing his behavior, and by the time he begins to start making amends, he presumably dies of a heart attack, suggesting that we are making moves to clean energy too little, too late to save ourselves. That message is fine, but it’s a bit unclear why we have to wade through Beard’s horrific lifestyle without a counterpoint, since nearly all the characters in the book are just as despicable or compromised as he.
Solar, however, is useful to me for three observations. For one, it features a particular scene that shows how you can shoehorn in ideas by combining a speech with a dramatic element. The other is to demonstrate the weakness of a narrative in which the inciting incident is completely contrived. The third is a more fundamental question: is this novel about climate or one man’s struggle with infidelity? What should be the balance between two elements, one rooted in theme, the other in character?
Let’s start with the successful dramatic element. In the middle of the novel, Beard gives a lecture about solar energy. Throughout the lecture, he recites clichés about solar energy, such as, “Solar will expand, and with your help, and with your and your clients’ enrichment, it will expand faster” (178) Whatever. Beard isn’t saying that much new and interesting here. What makes the speech dramatically compelling is that 1) we know he is ripping off his speech from the late Tom Aldous, the staffer who was having an affair with his wife and 2) that Beard ate a bad fish hors d’oeuvre at the reception before the speech and feels like he is about to vomit the entire time: “the nausea came in on a fresh wave and threatened to disgrace him… he had to keep talking to distract himself. And he had to talk fast. He was being pursued, he had to run” (176). When I started writing the novella version of the Geneva lecture scene in an early draft of my first novel, my undergrad advisor Patrick McGrath recommended I look to Solar for the example of this lecture scene. This example was helpful for framing the idea that a lecture in itself is not dramatic. Some dramatic subtext going on can do wonders for keeping the narrative going.
Despite these flashes of dramatic inspiration, Solar as a novel is hobbled by the fact that the entire narrative turns on the accidental death of Tom Aldous. Despite the fact that Beard possesses the motive to kill Aldous (the researcher is sleeping with Beard’s wife), what happens is that Aldous slips on a polar-bear-hide rug and cracks his skull:
But Aldous never reached Beard; he barely made it two meters into his run. The polar-bear rug on the polished floor was waiting for him. It came alive. (104)
By suggesting the rug “came alive,” McEwan is literally acknowledging that he’s invoking god from the machine. Another writer friend of mine takes issue with this scene in that is an unbelievable accident that would never happen so neatly in real life. From this moment on, the novel gets underway, as Beard frames another romantic rival, Rodney Tarpin, for the death of Aldous, and takes Aldous’ notes and uses them as the basis for his solar venture. So while Beard makes a decision after Aldous’ death, the decision does not expand or change his character, it is almost a passive decision after an absurdly extraordinary occurrence. Perhaps, had Beard had some role in Aldous’ death, like pushing him in a way that Aldous then fell and cracked his skull by happenstance, then the story would feel more realistic. But then Beard would have had to have been a more violent character altogether, and it seems that this was a direction McEwan did not want to take.
Despite this crippling flaw to the story, I wonder if Beard’s womanizing is overplayed in the novel at the expense of the climate theme. While Beard goes on climate-themed artist retreats in Norway and attends solar farm launches in Arizona, the vast majority of the novel’s runtime focuses on Beard fixating and obsessing over women. Perhaps this is part of McEwan’s point, that human nature is focused on sex and personal problems and incapable of meeting the larger problem at hand, but it’s also, like, kind of annoying. How much character work is needed in a book like this? The central problem, aside from the melodrama, is that Beard stole Aldous’ ideas. A little bit of infidelity goes a long way, and the fact that this element pervades every moment of Beard’s existence betrays the idea that this guy actually won the Nobel Prize and therefore must have been brilliant at some point. When Beard’s big fraud catches up to him, the novel picks up in its dramatic tension, but the vast amount of womanizing is not humorous but tedious and uncomfortable. Maybe if Beard were slightly more likable it would be more successful, but when the protagonist is this unlikeable the novel is hard to buy into, emotionally and intellectually.
So that’s where I stand on Solar. Deeply helpful for showcasing how to handle in-scene dramatic structure, but failing on a number of points that bring it crashing down. And yet McEwan is a great writer, so even a bad novel of his is still solid by other counts.
Works Cited
McEwan, Ian. Solar (New York: Anchor Books, 2010).