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Loading... Solar (original 2010; edition 2011)by Ian McEwan
Work detailsSolar by Ian McEwan (2010)
 sanrak | May 8, 2013 |  I am loathe to comment on this novel, which centers on a complex but ultimately immoral character. I could not find much sympathy for the protagonist, nor for many of the other people in the story. McEwan's talent carried me along through the story but I found it ultimately not very satisfying as Beard is such a repellent human being. I also wondered about the value of such a character study, since character study this book is--McEwan portrays Beard as a smart fellow with no redeeming qualities, and what's the point of that? There may be such people in the world but this novel did not help me understand them or how I should respond if I encounter someone like Beard. (  ) nmele | Apr 6, 2013 | Not one of his best, preferred the earlier works. But then, you cant hit the spot for every reader every time. (  ) Des2 | Mar 31, 2013 | This gave me everything I could have asked for from a new Ian McEwan, a topical subject,[ global-warming:] and a totally human, messy character making a mess of his life as we make a mess of the planet. My criticisms, if any, are very small ones. If one thinks of a random number to put in a story the usual choice will be 23, and this happens several times. (  ) Phil-James | Mar 30, 2013 | The protagonist of Solar, Michael Beard, is an amoral character and a brilliant scientist past his heyday. Beard lurches from one disaster to the next and an event at the start of the story eventually catches up with him at the end. Along the way his womanising, gluttony and dishonesty seemingly know no bounds. Can't say that this was a particular humorous book but then again this depends on your sense of humour. Worth reading but McEwan has written sharper books than this. (  ) sianpr | Mar 30, 2013 |
 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.  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. But as this is McEwan, the laughs fade away. The denouement of Solar in sunny New Mexico is not predictable but is predictably bleak, and my only reservation about the novel is that the end is a bit of a jolt, the brakes are applied rather forcefully. But perhaps this is because McEwan is planning Solar II. I hope so because I rather like Michael Beard. McEwan writes sentences of such witty elegance that the loss of John Updike seems a little easier to bear. But as a whole, this comedy about a venal scientist never generates the tension one expects from the Booker Prize-winning author of "Amsterdam" and "Atonement." According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad — so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed — that they’re actually rather good. “Solar,” the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good — so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off — that it’s actually quite bad. Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. There’s so little wrong with it that there’s nothing particularly right about it, either. It’s impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.
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Wikipedia in English (2)
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http://petekarnas.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/the-hilarity-of-tragedy/