High Temperatures for May: Time to Read a Funny Novel about Climate Change

The weather is exceptional, spookily so. Ian McEwean's novel Solar is excellent reading for such a time. The hero (and I use the term advisedly) is a physicist Michael Beard who for complicated reasons becomes deeply involved in reseaching alternate energy sources, specifically solar power.

Beard is fat, grasping, unpleasant, and very funny. Creating him was a way for McEwan to talk about a depressingly serious subject, climate change, and not have the reader gag after 15 pages on an overdose of apple pie and mother's milk.

Thete's a lesson here to all writers: don't let your characters carry your message if you want the message to be received. Have them struggle with it as wel as their character faults. The result is a much better read than polemical fiction, and may actually reach people beyond the circle of the alrady-convinced.

That said, McEwan's cleverness when it comes to plot may turn some people off.  Those who appreciate his frequently complex plots and the masses of research that lie behind  his stories learn not to be annoyed when he trots out descriptions of the intricacies of brain surgery (as in Saturday) or, as in this novel,  scientific explatnaions of how a good alternataive energy source might be developed.  Reading his work is like being the in company of a hyperactive, extremely intelligent friend whose company you cherish, but which also leaves you tired. 

The photo was taken on an arctic expedition he took part in, and which served, apparently, as background for Michael Beard's own foray into the Arctic with a bunch of artists.   In the novel the well-meaning participants can't even keep their personal gear in order with comic consequences: one wonders if the same thing happened when McEwan spent time in the frozen North.