Behind Door No. 1: Henry, age 49. Monogamous, tall, modestly attractive, fit (runs, plays squash). Respected London neurosurgeon, with a perfect, beautiful, successful wife, and two perfect, talented and verging-on-successful artistic children. Honest to a fault. Saves the life of a man who assaults him. Horny (but just for his wife).
Behind Door No. 2: Michael, age 53. Serial adulterer, short, balding, fat (“would rather die than take up jogging”). Nobel Prize-winning London physicist who hasn't done a lick of real science in two decades, on his fifth crumbling marriage, with no children (thank God). Mendacious to a fault. Frames a man who assaults him for murder. Horny (just horny).
Which one of these men would you rather read about?
Henry Perowne, the hero of Ian McEwan's Saturday, might make the better husband and squash partner, but Michael Beard, the anti-hero of McEwan's new novel Solar, is by far the more engaging literary protagonist.
Solar, by Ian McEwan, Knopf Canada, 288 pages, $32
Despite the almost universal huzzas for Saturday, I found the book a slog. Taking place on one day in the life of its protagonist, like Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, it's as fluidly and intelligently written as any McEwan novel, with the author's now-trademark disturbing and personally cataclysmic event at its core. But it's also a smug and mildly pretentious novel, striving too obviously to be profound, and somewhat bloodless to boot – a well-wrought exercise in craft and control, rather than something resembling the messiness of a life, any life.
Following the oddly affecting On Chesil Beach, a slim novel that takes place not during a single day, but a single hour, during which the life-changing, horrifying event involves premature ejaculation (tragic, rather than comic), Solar is, well, like a burst of perverse sunlight.
Plot in literary fiction! Sound the air-raid sirens!
Michael Beard, a misanthrope who is about as interested in climate change as he is about his fellow man (he can't even tell his six post-doctoral assistants apart), is appointed the head of the British government's new National Centre for Renewable Energy. A chance remark by this expert in quantum mechanics, who's been coasting for years on his Nobel for the Beard-Einstein Conflation (Beard, “sprinkled with Stockholm's magic dust,” clings to his Conflation like a shipwrecked man), has everyone at the Centre running off half-cocked to pour all of its resources into creating a single-household wind turbine.
The fun truly begins when Beard is invited to a retreat near the North Pole for artists and scientists to see global warming close-up. It turns out he's the sole scientist among the gathering of musicians, writers, ice sculptors and choreographers: “Caring little for art or climate change, and even less for art about climate change … the optimism was crushing him. Everyone but Beard was worried about global warming and was merry, and he was uniquely morose.”
The merry band of well-meaning artists fills the frigid air with poisonous fossil fuels as they make their way across fjords on jury-rigged snowmobiles in search of global warming. They build giant ice penguins and polar bears. The boot room at home-base becomes a point of contention – a veritable “ruin” – as vital outerwear (boots, snowsuits, goggles, mitts) become increasingly jumbled and go AWOL. “How were they to save the earth – assuming it needed saving, which he doubted – when it was so much larger than the boot room?”
