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Loading... Solar (original 2010; edition 2010)by Ian McEwan
Work InformationSolar by Ian McEwan (2010)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. While I have enjoyed many of his books, I have never thought of Ian McEwan as a particularly humorous writer. One of my favourites among his novels is Sweet Tooth, which shows him in relatively light-hearted mode, but even it does not leave the reader convulsed with laughter. I was, therefore, surprised that this novel should have won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature. I remember reading it shortly after it was published (and, indeed before it was warded that prize) and enjoying it. At that time, I was working on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Team at the Department for Education, and Michael Beard, the rather unpleasant protagonist, struck me as uncomfortably reminiscent of some of the external stakeholders in the science world with whom my colleagues and I had regularly to interact. Re-reading it now, a long way removed from the world of academic scientists, I found it heavier going. There are some very humorous moments, but it is not by any customary definition a comic novel. Michael Beard, a Nobel Laureate, is also a decidedly unempathetic character. Having been married four times when the novel opens, he finds himself in the unaccustomed position of being the cuckold, as is beautiful and much younger wife has taken up with a builder who had been working on their house. Thitherto, marital infidelity had been Beard’s own speciality, and he does not like having the tables turned. That particular bump in the marital road is resolved in unusual circumstances, and Beard moves on. McEwan’s observation of the gradual unravelling of Beard’s self-confidence is acute, and the hoops he goes through to try to retain his prominence within the academic science community (always terrified that the discoveries that had secured his meteoric early success might come to be challenged in the light of subsequent discoveries) and secure his financial future are very capably drawn. Somehow, though, the novel struggled to hold my attention this time around. While still a good book, it has not, in my view, aged well, and is not on a par with McEwan at his imperious best. I expected a lot more from this book. It deals with such an important issue; global warming. But unfortunately, the main character was one of the most un likeable people I've ever come across in a work of fiction. I got so tired of his moaning and whining and frankly, the best part of the book was when it ended, and he finally got what he deserved . This book was like reading a romantic physics book if you can picture that. Lots of jargon and then back to the romance story. I dragged myself through this book and wish I would of quit earlier. Michel Beard is a dislikable character. He is running on his merits of times past and doing nothing to continue except looking for money, food and women.
Solar is grappig, slim geschreven en spannend tot op de laatste bladzijde. Een roman om, Beardsgewijs, duimen en vingers bij af te likken. Despite the book’s somber, scientific backdrop (and global warming here is little but that), “Solar” is Mr. McEwan’s funniest novel yet — a novel that in tone and affect often reads more like something by Zoë Heller or David Lodge. Like “Amsterdam,” this latest book shows off his gifts as a satirist, but while it gets off to a rollicking start, its plot machinery soon starts to run out of gas, sputtering and stalling as it makes its way from one comic set piece to another. Solar” is een vermakelijke en bijzonder goed gevulde roman, waarvan ook de wetenschappelijke gedeelten strak en helder geschreven zijn. Ian McEwan weet als zo vaak minutieus realisme en stilistische elegantie met elkaar te verenigen. De vraag die velen zich wel zullen stellen is: waar wil McEwan met zijn lezer naar toe? Er is namelijk slechts één gids: de onbetrouwbare anti-held Michael Beard, “passé” als geleerde maar niet genoeg om hem zo maar van de tafel te vegen. Zijn seksuele en andersoortige geeuwhonger maakt van deze Nobelprijslaureaat wel een karikaturale omkering van wat de nieuwe mens zou moeten zijn en hoe hij zich op een verantwoordelijke wijze tot de aarde en zijn medebewoners zou moeten gedragen. Lightness, however, comes less easily to McEwan, whose style depends on deliberateness and a certain ponderousness. The ominous lining up of causes and effects and the patient tweaking of narrative tension don't always mesh well with the aimed-for quickness and brio. Some of the humour is quite broad: there's a rather clunking motif concerning polar bears, and Beard gets involved with a stereotypical Southern waitress who's called, in the way of trailer-trash types, Darlene. He emerges as a figure of some comic dynamism, but the pages on his childhood and youth, though brilliantly done, articulate poorly with the knockabout parts of the plot. Once it became clear that the book's world is comic, I also found myself wondering if it wouldn't have benefited from being more loosely assembled, with shorter, discontinuous episodes and Beard functioning along the lines of Updike's Bech, Nabokov's Pnin or the consciousness in Calvino's Cosmicomics. Beard is as robust and full-fleshed and ebullient a character as McEwan has come up with. And in Solar, he shows a side to himself as a writer — a puckishness, a broadness of humour, an extravagance of style — that we haven’t seen before. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
When Nobel prize-winning physicist Michael Beard's personal and professional lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, an opportunity presents itself in the guise of an invitation to travel to New Mexico. Here is a chance for him to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster. No library descriptions found. |
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The central character of this book, Michael Beard, has won a Nobel prize. But at this point he's clearly coasting on his laurels. He's on his fifth marriage. Rather than doing research or teaching, he's into getting funding for a Center he heads. The Center has a positive goal, reducing climate change by developing renewal energy. They are creating rooftop wind generators which he knows will never be workable. He's had countless affairs even though he's married beautiful women who adored him. He pays little attention to his assistants who desperately seek his approval. He seeks liquor whenever anything becomes troublesome. He's narcissistic, self-absorbed, and lacks empathy. In short, he's a cad. Yes, he's a Nobel laureate, are we supposed to overlook everything else?
It even gets darker. His beautiful young wife is no longer talking to him. She's been pushed over the edge. She's having a very public affair with someone who had worked on their house. Beard is beside himself. Returning home from a trip unexpectedly, he discovers she's also having an affair with the brightest assistant in his Center. The assistant had been trying to get Beard to abandon the rooftop wind generators and focus on solar, which is closer to what Beard's Nobel prize was based on. The assistant slips, hits his head and dies. Beard sees an opportunity He gets the workman's hammer from a closet, dips it in the assistant's blood and plants it as incriminating evidence. Workman goes to jail. Beard solves two problems at once. Our opinion of Beard plummets even if we had been sympathetic so far.
It gets worse. Beard reads what the assistant had wanted to show him. He realizes the assistant has created designs that will make solar viable as a renewable energy source and solve the climate change problem. Beard appropriates the designs as his own, and for the next several years he rides this wave based on "his" designs. He has an amazing ability to escape the consequences of what he's done. Still having affairs, still drinking, still getting older. Will his luck ever run out? You'll have to read the book to find out. ( )