Solar: Ian McEwan's new novel proves he's still one to watch

From the moment I was first introduced to Ian McEwan’s work back in the early 1980s by my friend Stephanie Ortenzi, I’ve considered him not only one to watch, but one to champion. As one of a handful of British writers whose work I always read and almost always buy (Graham Swift, Julian Barnes and William Boyd are the others on the list), a new Ian McEwan novel is always something to celebrate. So I've been waiting very impatiently for Solar's release for almost a year, since a Brazilian journalist doing a PhD in science communications first told me it was in the works. When I tweeted that I'd read it, my former boss was too impatient to wait for my review and demanded the 140-character version. He's probably already bought it and read it by now, though, since it's been at least three days.

It’s almost time to go back and re-read early McEwan, because he’s not the writer he used to be. That’s actually a neutral/positive statement, not a condemnation. Around the time The Child In Time was published (1987), I saw a televised interview with him in which he described his early work as being ‘dark and inaccessible’ and said that he wanted to change that. He certainly succeeded (that novel won the Whitbread Novel Award). Amsterdam won the Booker Prize, Atonement was shortlisted for the Booker in 2001, and its 2007 film adaptation was nominated for an Academy Award (although I think you’ll be hard pressed to find many who loved the book and also loved the film, again based on an admittedly small and highly subjective sampling).

Atonement was not, however, the first McEwan novel filmed; Andrew Birkin directed The Cement Garden from the 1978 McEwan work of the same name in 2003. If you read either the novel or the film’s descriptions in the links I’ve provided, you’ll notice how often the words ‘dark’ and ‘murky’ are used. Freud would have had a field day with McEwan’s early works, in which both sensuality and sexuality were simultaneously subterranean and omnipresent. They left you with a vague and disconcerting sense of unease, a feeling that you hadn’t quite understood what he meant but you didn’t really want to delve deeper because it might hurt you at a shockingly profound level of your being. Or at least that’s how I felt – it was mesmerizing but somehow dangerous. Reading early McEwan made me feel like a rather nastily atavistic voyeur, as if I’d been unable to resist reading a trusted friend’s diary, inadvertently ended up peeping through a keyhole, or unintentionally eavesdropped on a conversation with overtones so sinister as to negate all of the guilty pleasures of gossip.

His later work continues to provoke this sense of unease in some, although I’m not sure why. Either I’m acclimatized to it by now, no longer convinced voyeurism is as creepy as I once thought it was, or the nature of his work really has changed in a rather fundamental way.

Certainly in the novels from The Child in Time to On Chesil Beach, McEwan has steadfastly employed a single plot device that’s both valid and fascinating: a single chance but determining moment that alters the course of his characters’ existence irremediably. There’s nothing new about this kind of ‘right place, wrong time’ plot device – and in fact, in Atonement, the discovery of the note that fatally alters the course of two of the main characters’ lives (or does it? because there is an alternate ending) isn’t that dissimilar from the note Angel Clare doesn’t find in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. By On Chesil Beach, however, this plot device had been stretched beyond the breaking point, and that novel was so slight as to be almost negligible, because it was frankly implausible.

So it was obviously time for another change of course (since McEwan is not an Anita Brookner, and has never been content to rewrite the same the novel till he gets it right – and then continue to rewrite its ghostly imitations ever after – and I say that not to be mean to Brookner, whose Hotel du Lac is one of the most perfect short novels I have ever read, almost on par with The Great Gatsby).

Solar is a novel whose central character is a ‘fat, lying bastard of a physicist…a philandering, greedy, rather deceitful sort of man,’ as McEwan himself says in the Little Atoms podcast interview. This is a bit of an understatement – Michael Beard, who wins a Nobel Prize early in his scientific career for what becomes known as the Beard-Einstein Conflation, is a remarkably – an astonishingly – an intrinsically – almost a pathologically deceitful sort of man. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s stealing a colleague’s work, a fellow traveller’s potato chips, cheating on one or another of his five (serially married) wives, or hastily boning up on Milton to impress the first woman he marries, morally Michael Beard has no centre whatsoever – or rather his centre shifts constantly at the whims of his childishly greedy convenience.

And he’s greedy about everything: food, women, money, honours, his own creature comforts. He’s always late – for meetings, conferences, dinners, work. And yet somehow the world is being mean to him when, having overslept, he has to start his day without coffee. Or give a speech before he’s made serious inroads into the smoked salmon sandwiches.

The central paradox of this novel is that Michael Beard is a totally unappealing character by the time we meet him at age 50 – and frankly it’s hard to imagine that there ever was anything appealing about him at all. The beautiful mind in the physics/math sense he may once have possessed is never on display in the novel, and there’s a suggestion that he was a bit of a default, compromise Nobel winner, that his selection as the prize recipient was a highly political choice designed not to upset other candidates who could only be mollified if none of the top contenders for the prize that year won. There are one or two scientists in the novel who buoy him up from time to time and insist that the Beard-Einstein Conflation was – and remains – both a scientifically elegant and significant piece of work. But they’re few and far between. And yet – and yet – somehow he manages to attract not only five wives, but, during the course of his fifth marriage, an astonishing additional 11 lovers in less than five years, not all of which are one-night stands.

While Beard grows older (naturally), fatter (considerably), and balder (slightly) over the course of the novel's nine-year span, his emotional growth is pegged at one ahead, two back. When he's finally trapped into reproduction, he provides for his offspring financially but he still can't quite commit to being faithful to the mother of his child. Nor can he bring himself to abandon the flat of his own that, after several years of his occupation, is undoubtedly a health hazard not only to himself, but probably to all his neighbours as well.

In a pre-publication interview about his new novel, McEwan stated categorically that he hates ‘the comic novel’ and that he finds them strenuous, like being held down and tickled. (It's not clear whether he means he hates reading them or writing them.) The comic elements in Solar are necessary, he says, ‘because the subject matter is climate change. It's so colossal, it's so serious, it's so morally weighted that it could kill a novel, it could drown it, it could melt it - whichever climate change image you want,’ if there weren’t comic elements in the novel. He was only two-thirds of the way through writing the novel at that point, however, and while I’m not suggesting his stance on the comic novel has changed, I do think Solar is, in fact, a comic novel. You can’t write a novel in which the central character is, essentially, a buffoon, and also position him as a hero or his actions as heroic. Certainly Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman is a comic novel - and yet it's a serious work of fiction. Don't go by the Wikipedia definition of comic novel either - or if you do, prepare to be astonished to see Evelyn Waugh listed as a 'comic novelist' - Wikipedia is aware that he also wrote Brideshead Revisited, yes?

The comic element of Solar with the greatest public appeal (from what I’ve seen to date in reviews and on the internet) is the frozen penis scene, in which Beard is whisked away to a near-Arctic expedition, the lone scientist locked up on an ice-bound ship for a week with a group of artists. Having overslept, Beard leaves the hotel without having had coffee, and somehow having failed to use the bathroom in his rush to catch up the rest of his party heading for the ice-bound ship. During the course of the jostling, several-hour-long snowmobile ride, he’s forced to stop to pee, gets his willy stuck to the zipper of his outdoor gear, and – well – it continues from there, with the angst of his need to pee during the first half of the trip being replaced by the fear throughout the second half that his penis is frozen solid. The culmination of this scene is an understated tube of lip gloss, if you can believe it. As a non-penis owner this segment of the book didn’t really work for me as either realism or comedy, I’m afraid. After all, if you're the kind of man whose wife's lover slaps you rather than punching you, how important can the literal manifestation of your masculinity really be?

An earlier scene in the novel, when Beard is still living with wife number five, knows she's having an affair and is trying to make her jealous, is far funnier than the frozen willy scene.

Far more effective than both, however, is the scene on the train, where Beard, several years later, is rushing to make a speech at a conference. His flight's been delayed, he hasn't eaten (or rather, he hasn't eaten what he wanted to eat), and having grabbed a bag of salt and vinegar chips/crisps at the airport, he becomes convinced his travelling companion on the train from the airport is stealing his treat. Some excerpts from that scene:

‘Right before him on the table, shimmering through his barely parted lashes, were the salt and vinegar crisps… He pulled himself up in his seat and leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands propping his chin for several reflective seconds, gaze fixed on the gaudy wrapper, silver, red and blue, with cartoon animals cavorting below a Union Jack. So childish of him, this infatuation, so weak, so harmful, a microcosm of all past errors and folly, of that impatient way he had of having to have what he wanted instantly. He took the bag in both hands and pulled its neck apart… He lifted clear a single crisp between forefinger and thumb, replaced the bag on the table, and sat back. He was a man to take his pleasures seriously. The trick was to set the fragment on the centre of the tongue and, after a moment’s spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. His theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain…. Inevitably the second crisp was less piquant, less surprising, less penetrating than the first, and it was precisely this shortfall, this sensual disappointment, that prompted the need, familiar to drug addicts, to increase the dose. He would eat two crisps at once.’

The scene continues to a broadly comic climax, and Beard realizes he’s made a fool of himself. Ill-prepared to speak at the conference, he decides to include the crisps anecdote at the end of his speech. And this – at almost precisely the midpoint of the novel – is where things get interesting. Earlier, when one of the artists on the ice-bound ship is talking and makes a basic scientific mistake, Beard has sprung up and corrected him at great length, thus earning the admiration of all the artists on board (he’s the only scientist, and has been engaging with them as little as possible). In contrast to that scene, after his speech on climate change and the artificial photosynthesis solution to energy generation Beard is promoting (and has patented), Mellon, a lecturer in urban studies and folklore, interested in ‘the forms of narrative that climate science has generated … an epic story … with a million authors’ approaches Beard. Mellon – who in Beard’s opinion has a ‘squiffy view of reality’ - asks him where came across the story of the crisps. Beard replies that it’s just happened to him on the train, to which Mellon replies, ‘Come now, Professor Beard. We’re all grown-ups here,’ and proceeds to tell him Beard’s story is a well known tale with many variations (although not yet one involving crisps), included in novels by Jeffrey Archer, Roald Dahl and Douglas Adams amongst others, called ‘The Urban Thief.’

This scene ends shortly after this, but it’s significant, not only because of the juxtaposition of the contrasting reactions of the artist:scientist and scientist:folklorist it sets up. It underscores earlier scenes on the ship when the group – all but Beard almost tragically impaired by their individual and collective guilt about how we’ve wrecked our planet and yet passionately committed not so much to creating a solution but at least to lamenting their grief at the impasse by means of their art – can neither keep the room in which their Arctic outdoor gear is stored organized nor resist the impulse to steal each other’s boots and mittens. In that situation, Beard is the lone voice in the wilderness, trying to tidy the room, observing the rules, carefully placing his own gear on the peg assigned to him.

This is yet another fascinating McEwan novel, a welcome and substantial meal after the insubstantiality (dare I say it? the bag of crisps) of On Chesil Beach, and yet another direction for his work. May he have many more – novels and directions.

For some other reviews of Solar, see The Guardian, The Vancouver Sun, and The Daily Mail. And for a delightful interview with McEwan by Adam Rutherford, download the Little Atoms podcast, in which members of the science community embrace an artist as if he were one of their own. You do, of course, have to let the artist have the last word, however. As McEwan says in that interview, 'I have no interest in science, I'm just intellectually curious....In five years' time I'll know a fraction of what I know now' about climate change science.

Nobody's muse: a review of Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag

In 1985, Canada's Minister of Justice John Crosbie ignited a controversy in the House of Commons when he told Liberal MP Sheila Copps to 'quiten down, baby.' Her retort, that she was 'nobody's baby,' became so inextricably linked with her political persona that she used it as the title of her autobiography, which, sadly, seems to be out of print.

Irene America, the iconic protagonist of Louise Erdrich's latest novel, Shadow Tag, would have done well to borrow a little of Ms Copps' feistiness at an earlier age. By the time we encounter her, she's been married to Gil for a decade and a half and is only now picking up the pieces of her abandoned PhD thesis on 19thC 'painter of Native Americana George Catlin.' Gil himself has irritatingly been referred to as a 'Native Edward Hopper' and his work really has only one subject: Irene America 'in all of her incarnations--thin and virginal, a girl, then womanly, pregnant, naked, demurely posed or frankly pornographic.' He is that rarity in North America, an artist capable of supporting a family with his income from painting. As the novel opens, however, Gil is floundering artistically, 'His paintings were hiding from him because Irene was hiding something. He could see it in the opacity of her eyes, the insolence of her flesh, the impatient weariness of her body when she let down her guard. She'd ceased to love him. Her gaze was an airless void.'

The real pornography contained within this novel is not the way Gil paints Irene or the descriptions of the sexual, physical and alcohol abuse in which they both indulge but in his maniacal desire to possess her, to know her, to breathe her living essence as if she were oxygen and he was on life support. Erdrich does a superb job of creating an atmosphere so overwhelmingly smothering that it is absolutely intolerable. It's a good thing she does, because without it she would have written a novel in which both main characters are so hopelessly and disgustingly co-dependent that it might have been unreadable as opposed to just painfully believable. It's possible to muster a modicum of sympathy for and empathy with Irene America though, enough that one can initially forgive her for her treachery, because it's easy to understand how truly mind-bending life with a man like Gil can be.

So initially you're with Irene when, after discovering Gil has been reading her diary, she decides to use the diary as a weapon against him. She starts constructing entries solely for his consumption, paragraphs and pages designed to drive him over the edge - of sexual jealousy and insecurity, of sanity, of alcoholism - while resuming her real journal writing in another volume she stashes in a bank safety deposit box.

As the novel continues, however, and the collateral damage experienced primarily by Gil and Irene's three children becomes apparent (not to mention the increasing nausea one experiences at the damage the two of them inflict on each other), it becomes increasingly difficult to do anything but shake your head in horror. When Irene finally tells Gil she wants a divorce, after a short round of surrealistic marriage counselling (some of the best scenes in the novel), it's impossible to believe that even physical and emotional separation will do much to change the dynamics between this pair. They're opposite sides of the same coin - and this coin has spent most of its life on the railroad tracks being repeatedly run over by self-propelled freight trains.

Gil's initial response to Irene's request for a divorce is to throw a huge surprise party for her. But of course in Gil's ever-more-twisted emotional world, he can't just throw her a party, he has to arrange for Irene's half sister to not only keep her away from the house until the party's due to start, but also has to conscript the half sister to spy on Irene so he can confirm his suspicions that Irene is having an affair.

Of course you can't blame Gil for thinking this, since Irene makes a point of creating journal entries in which she manufactures other lovers and provides convincing details to back up her claim at their first marriage counselling session that Gil isn't, in fact, the father of any of 'their' three children.

This is unexpectedly bleak territory for Erdrich. There is little humour in this novel, and the little there is falls into the bitter, twisted, and black category. It's a departure for her as a novelist, and it's worth celebrating for that. Her portrait of the dissolution of not only a marriage but of both its partners as swiftly and surely as a Kleenex in a torrential downpour, is compelling and tragic, and this time it's not mitigated by the hyperbolic humour and magic realism of my favourite of her novels, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. In writing this review, I realize I've managed to miss Erdrich's previous novel, The Plague of Doves, which sounds almost as bleak as this one. The difference is that Erdrich's not writing a mythical or historical narrative in Shadow Tag - she's written a contemporary and realistic book that ventures into territory occupied by a long tradition of American prose writers stretching from Henry James and Edith Wharton to Richard Ford, via John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and Russell Banks. I couldn't be more delighted to see her stretching, growing and flexing her literary muscle. How many profoundly important books can one woman write? With any luck, we're nowhere near the answer to that question.