Solar **1/2

By Ian McEwan.
Published in 2010 by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, The Random House Group Ltd., London.
287 Pages.

On Face Book there is an application called Shiite gifts for academics and it's really funny.   You can send really crappy gifts to your friends in academia.  For example you can send obsolete and broken technology and there will be a picture of a beat up old overhead projector.  You can also send people as gifts such as the creepy, ogling colleague or the spoiled coed with the car that's nicer than yours.  There's one i really like.  You can send a professor who behaves like a character in a Phillip Roth novel.  The implication is that these characters are pretty despicable (and I tend to relate to Roth's character - oh no!)  This book reminds me of a Philip Roth book because here we have a character that behaves pretty despicable, yet the reader is attached to him because we see everything from his point of view.

So the story goes that this middle aged, balding and fat man named Michael Beard is a scientist who many years previously won the Nobel Peace Prize for some formula or concept he had thought up.  After that he had been pretty much resting on hi laurels and accepting institutional positions and opportunities to speak to make money.  The book starts out with him involved in one of many marriages and affairs.  He's constantly cheating on his wives and lovers - despicable.  He's fat bald and middle aged yet he's still able to get the girls (writer's fantasy?)

He's appointed to be head of a new facility that is opened in England to compete with America's program on alternative energies.  After some faltering first steps, the organization decides to put it's energies into Micheal's idea of producing wind turbins on a small scale so that every home in London can afford one.  After a while Beard realizes that it is a horrible idea, but everyone is so gung ho about it, he decides to go with the flow.

That is until one of his young superstar upstarts starts to talk with him about an idea of using Solar Energy that is converted to electricity in a unique and efficient new way ( I can't remember the exact process).  Beard is reluctant though he knows his idea is a terrible one. 

Then there is a freak accident and the young man is now out of the picture.  Beard decides to take the kid's idea and run with it claiming that it is all his own in hopes to garner attention and to frankly save the world (from global warming of course).  Despicable!  The novel progresses by describing his current relationship/s and the onward march to the revelation of his project to the world.  But with all the bridges he's burned (he doesn't do well in social situations either) and all the hearts he has broken, everything catches up to him at the finale when he is ready to unveil his much loved project.

I like McEwan's sense of humor, something that has not been a focal point in any of the books I have read by him previously.  Some of the technical jargon gets to be a little too much and can be a bit frustrating, but I can manage to follow most of it.  Not his greatest work but funny and thought provoking.  And current in today's science and politics.

Here are two videos. One is an interview and one is a reading by the author.



And an excerpt...



here's an interview.