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Anchor Books

Solar

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Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement, this “totally gripping and entirely hilarious” novel (The Wall Street Journal) traces the arc of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s ambitions and self-deception. Dr. Michael Beard’s best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and halfheartedly heads a government- backed initiative tackling global warming. Meanwhile, Michael’s fifth marriage is floundering due to his incessant womanizing. When his professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Michael to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and save the world from environmental disaster. But can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity? Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (March 8, 2011)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 332 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307739538


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 37


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10 ounces


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.18 x 0.76 x 7.96 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #527,170 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1,043 in Dark Humor #8,378 in Family Life Fiction (Books) #26,589 in Literary Fiction (Books)


#1,043 in Dark Humor:


#8,378 in Family Life Fiction (Books):


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Michael Beard Is Our Updated Rabbit
I note what the two who gave this a one-star rating have to say about Michael Beard. I disagree, not about Michael Beard being unlikable--of course he is!--but about his not being a truly outstanding literary character. I predict Michael Beard will be remembered as a character as well conceived as Saul Bellow's Henderson and John Updike's Rabbit. Or Shakespeare's Falstaff. It is unbelievable that we live at a time when people reject the science of climate change. But if you are one, like me, who are concerned about what is happening to our planet, then take a trip into this novel where Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is the head of an institute designed to provide us with solar alternatives except Michael Beard may well not have been the best choice that year for the honor bestowed upon him in Stockholm. (I will refrain from detailing a parallel with Barack Obama who won the Nobel Peace Prize and then increased our troops presence in Afghanistan!) Dr. Beard is in his fifties now and has collected five wives and is thankful none has produced children. Indeed the world is probably better off for that! Patrice is number five and she is doing to him what he did to his other wives: she is cheating, openly so. And that is how the novel begins as he obsesses about what to do. But fortunately he is needed as the only scientist among a gaggle of artists to travel on an expedition in the North Pole. Lest you think this is going to be the real North Pole, never fear. Not quite. But he does have to travel on a snowmachine, this very overweight guy who forgets to relieve his bladder and there he is on this hundred kilometer hike and needing to stop to relieve himself. For pages we are treated to one of the greatest scenes I have read in years: the removal of his penis and the aftermath somewhere next to a glacier! That's enough. It only gets better and better as our prophet in solar physics leads us into... Well, I'm not telling. But this is a must-read book. And I predict it wins a big prize. Hey, maybe even the Nobel! Now that would be ironic. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2010 by Eric Selby
    • Mr. Beard's Opus
Despite the book's cover photo of the sun, the jacket blurb, and a few publicity sound bites, this isn't remotely a book about global warming or solar power. Rather, it's a character study that in McEwan's mind speaks volumes about the human difficulty of dealing with comprehensive, global problems such as a warming planet and melting ice caps. All this in the person of Michael Beard, a sixty-something PhD and a decades-earlier winner of a Nobel prize in physics, for the Beard-Einstein Conflation - a literary/scientific invention I won't attempt to explain here. Beard is revered in academic circles, and he's managed to live off his fame and reputation - both slowly eroding until his connection to the murder of his fifth wife's lover very nearly plunges Beard's life into the social gutter altogether. But Beard has the survival instincts of a cockroach. The opportunist in him sees a professional resurrection in a project intended to make hay of sunshine, i.e., a method of collecting sun energy and turning it into a more usable energy for humans by processing the energy of photons - particles (or waves) of light - in a new way. He has no real interest in this scheme, other than that of personal aggrandizement, but he wades into it as if it were the cause of his lifetime. He visits a polar expedition to survey the melting ice cap, only to nearly freeze his penis while taking a whizz in sub-zero temperatures. Later, yin meets yang as he soldiers across the U.S.'s Southwest and through its benumbing heat only to face legal action over his solar scheme. Along the way, and finally wary of marriage, Michael takes up with a colleague, Melissa. Her biological clock is ticking - she quits her birth control pills, and the eternally horny physicist becomes, against his wishes, the father of a girl, Catriona. But Michael, ever the peripatetic lover, ends up in bed with an American waitress (sorry, Tiger), named Darlene, promising her in the midst of coitus that he will marry her. How does Michel extract himself from legal action over his solar project, as well as the magnified rage of dual spurned lovers? It's a finale to make Anton Chekov proud, and I won't spoil its impact for you here. It may sound as though I'm perhaps sordidly enamored of McEwan's story, and that isn't a bad evaluation of this my first reading of Solar. However, there are things I don't care for about the story. There's a problem all writers face - no matter how inventive their story-telling skills - and that's the tandem of complacency and predictability. Once a writer has success with a particular style and structure, the tendency is to remain with it. McEwan's stylistic trademark is his narrative. His prose isn't pedestrian, but neither is it particularly eloquent. What has worked about his style has been, in my mind, the strength of his characterizations, the occasional sizzle of dialogue, a gifted wit, and a strong sense of history in both characterization and story. After all, the only relevance in reading fiction in an age of compulsory "reality" is the significance of history's impact on a fiction writer's characters. With so much going for McEwan behind the scenes, we - this reader, at least - tend to bless his preoccupation with narrative as if it were his forte. Surely McEwan thinks it is. But since modernity (the version we associate with fiction), writers from James Joyce to Oates, Roth and Franzen have had to cope with the impact of visual arts on literature. In recent decades, this means cinema. Thus, writers have had to create ever more transparent narrators in order to present a more cinematic literature. The advantage to readers of such transparency has been to invite them more intimately into the story, the history, the characters. And this in turn has allowed readers to engage fiction's characters in both their outer and inner lives. With the advent of the public-at-large's preoccupation with counseling, self-help, and psychological insight, we readers can now use characterization to mirror our own demons, our own emotional ups and downs. But McEwan, in such an age, requires us to "filter" such fictive experience though his narrators. He's an astute observer of human quirks and foibles - he may very well have become a successful comedian - and as he speaks through his narrator he gives us imminently memorable psychological insights. But the problem of such emphasis on the narrator deprives readers of the intimacy we're all used to in experiencing both the linearity of story and the depth of meaning behind it. True, McEwan's insights into human behavior are near-impeccable - one might argue that a reader would never realize the human condition McEwan's narrators present so facilely. But this is too much like the doting parent who hovers too closely, depriving children of both the scars and successes of personal experience. In such hands, readers and children are led - they don't learn. But enough of that - McEwan's all-too-consistent narrative style in the face of diminishing tension and predictable story structure will remain forgiven, at least for a few more books. Still, Solar will be panned in some reviews for reasons McEwan is surely aware of. And perhaps he'll be delighted by such dissing. First, many will be disappointed that Michael Beard, McEwan's protagonist, is such a louse. He's a serial womanizer - inside and outside marriage. He's a slovenly beast, something of a caricature of the sloppy, unkempt academic that seems to live only in the mind. He cares little about his looks, drinks too much, eats too much, and seems to have no rheostats on his manifold appetites. We yearn for heroes these days - to the point of naming everyone in a uniform from Little League on up a hero. But I suspect McEwan persists in his anti-heroic writing to remind us that, outside of accidents of fate, heroes are made - by facing their weaknesses and demons - not born of ideological posturing. And where academics are supposed to be paragons of reason - a condition that's supposed to give them a healthy moral compass - Beard is completely amoral, as best we can judge - a complete victim of his senses. The implication here is a complaint against rationality of some long standing: that reason and mental prowess isn't, in the postmodern world, always a tool for the perpetuation of a healthy society. Reason, we learn, can be a weapon of the paranoid-schizophrenic as well as an implement of a person of monumental wisdom. Finally - and certainly most provocatively - McEwan becomes an equal opportunity social critic in Solar by tweaking the postmodern world's ugliest dog - that of political correctness. I won't give examples, but it seems safe enough to say that while his womanizing is indicative of his attitudes toward women, he occasionally speaks truth when faced with the pragmatisms of gender issues. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2010 by Gridley

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