Being a Nobel prize winner means you've done something amazing. Nobody else before you did that. Today many others, most likely, are building on what you achieved. The world is likely in your debt for what you did. All this implies we are prone to think very positively of a Nobel laureate. Once you read this book, you will never think that way again.

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. ( )

Human Spirit

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. ( )