Michael Beard, Nobel Prize winner for Physics and antihero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 novel, Solar, is a grotesquely comic character. Increasingly obese through the novel’s three sections, he finds himself unable to control his ravenous appetite for food (whether fine or gross), adulation, sex (and possibly marriage), booze, salt and vinegar crisps, travel, well-paid sinecures and solar energy patents. Darlene, the Nebraskan, New Mexico-resident waitress (originally named Janet) who is set on becoming his sixth wife, tells him that he is “not an entirely good person” (p. 265) and neither is she, but she doesn’t know the half of it. Beard has framed one of his fifth wife’s lovers for the murder of his successor in that role and seen him sentenced to sixteen years. The death was in fact a ridiculous accident but it could be made to look like foul play and occurred in circumstances that must lead to suspicion falling on Beard.

The dead man, Tom Aldous, had been a post-doc in the National Centre for Renewable Energy of which Beard was the titular head, known as “Chief”. Beard, who hadn’t done any real scientific work in twenty years, and now believed himself incapable of following Aldous’s theories or workings, had genuinely been an intellectual powerhouse in his twenties and had come up with a refinement of Einstein’s account of the photoelectric effect. That discovery was what won him the Nobel Prize.

Tom Aldous had admired Beard’s earlier work but, like the other post-docs in the centre (whom Beard found indistinguishable from each other) he progressed beyond Beard’s present level of understanding. Aldous had been trying to interest Beard in the possibility of artificial photosynthesis, in mimicing the process by which plants with leaves obtain energy from sunlight. Speaking of the growing enthusiasm for a return to nuclear power generation, Aldous said:

“Dirty, dangerous, expensive. But you know, we’ve already got a nuclear power station up and running with a great safety record making clean energy converting hydrogen to helium at no cost, nicely situated ninety-three million miles away. You know what I always think, Professor Beard? If an alien arrived on Earth and saw all the sunlight, he’d be amazed to hear that we think we’ve got an energy problem. Photovoltaics! I read Einstein on it, I read you. The Conflation is brilliant. And God’s greatest gift to us is surely this, that a photon striking a semiconductor releases an electron. The laws of physics are so benign, so generous …” (p. 26–7)

At this point Beard, in spite of his position at the head of the Centre for Renewable Energy, is sceptical about both the risk of climate change and the potential of solar power as a source of energy to replace fossil fuels. After Aldous’s death, Beard is given a file of the younger man’s calculations which at first he finds it difficult to follow. But when Beard is sacked from the Centre (after some ill judged remarks about women’s aptitude for physics are amplified by a professor of science studies who believes that a particular gene, “or any gene, was in the strongest sense, socially constructed” (p. 131), he reads Aldous’s file more attentively and finds that he can, with difficulty, make sense of it. Within a few years he has registered several patents relating to synthetic photosynthesis.

The idea is to use the sun’s energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which can be compressed and the hydrogen used as fuel. The attraction of this approach is that the compressed hydrogen can be stored with negligible loss when the energy is converted into another form. In contrast, electricity generated by photovoltaics and not required for immediate use will need to be stored, for example in batteries, and some energy will be lost in the process. It’s not clear to me whether McEwan, writing in or shortly before 2010, considered synthetic photosynthesis as a realistic possibility, or whether he thought of his antihero as pursuing an unachievable goal. In one sense, it doesn’t matter that much what the author thought. Solar is a work of fiction, not a polemical or didactic tract. It was certainly not intended as a road-map towards our post-fossil-fuel future.

As it turns out though, battery technology has improved so much in recent years that photovoltaics have come to look like our best bet for a solution to the energy “crisis”, while we learn from Wikipedia that synthetic photosynthesis “has never been demonstrated in any practical sense”. Whether or not his author knew it, Professor Beard was never likely to see a return on his investors’ millions. For this reason, Solar is a decidedly more pessimistic work than its comic tone might seem to indicate.

Reviewing it in The Guardian, Christopher Tayler wrote:

Beard's argument about the correct response to climate change, an argument that McEwan has also made, is that we have no choice but to hope that technological ingenuity, enlightened self-interest and the market's allocation of resources can get us off the hook; personal virtue counts for little.

To this I’d add, first, that technological ingenuity can take many forms, and that we’re probably lucky that one particular form it has taken recently is the development of much better batteries; and second, that Beard’s self-interest is not, for the most part, noticeably enlightened. One of his projects is horrific:

The idea was to dump many hundreds of tons of iron filings in the ocean, enriching the waters and encouraging the plankton to bloom. As it grew, it absorbed more carbon dioxide from the air. The precise amount could be calculated in order to claim carbon credits, which would be sold on through the scheme to heavy industry. If a coal-burning company bought enough, it could rightfully claim that its operations were carbon neutral. (p. 187)

Early in the novel Beard accepts an invitation from an all-expenses-paying foundation to spend six nights aboard an ice-bound ship in a fjord in Spitsbergen. He is to be one of “twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change” (p. 46). As it turns out, he is the only scientist on board. The group’s convenor warns that there are strict rules which must be followed concerning the boot room:

All coming on board must stop there and remove and hang up their outer layers. On no account was wet, snowy or iced-up clothing to be brought into the living quarters. Prohibited items included helmets, goggles, balaclavas, gloves, boots, wet socks and snowmobile suits. Penalty for infringement was certain death. (p. 62)

Over the course of the visit, the boot room descends into steadily worsening disorder, something that Beard finds intolerable, while remaining oblivious to his own significant contribution to the decline. On arrival, he hangs his snowmobile suit on peg 28 and places the other impermissible items under it. The next morning, he is put out to find that his stuff is not to be found on or under peg 18, which is where he is sure he left it, so he takes a suit, gloves and so on from another peg. Returning that afternoon, he finds that somebody else has used the peg he thinks of as his, so he moves their things to another free peg. This pattern of behaviour continues. The convenor’s warning notwithstanding, nobody actually dies, though the author doesn’t explain how a fatality is avoided.

Though I referred above to Michael Beard as “a grotesquely comic character” and described the novel’s tone as comic, it’s probably best to think of Solar less as a comedy than as a savage satire. Rereading it over the past few days, I was left feeling less hopeful about humankind’s capacity to avert or mitigate the climate catastrophe than I had been. Beard, with his inability to control his various appetites or to change his behaviour, and his repeated pattern (despite his intellectual brilliance) of making the wrong choices in the different spheres of his life, represents our species in general (as Christopher Tayler’s review points out). There is a suggestion that his blinkered self-interested fumblings might lead to a workable solution to our climate catastrophe, but there are so many wrong paths open to him that the prospects don’t look favourable.

Notwithstanding the savagery of the satire, McEwan seems to regard his protagonist with something more like regret than contempt. Beard, it might be said, is no more capable of acting contrary to his nature than a scorpion being ferried across a river by a frog. Several of the reviews I’ve read suggest that the novel’s comedy is a departure for McEwan. The sharply satirical depiction of its protagonist strikes me as reminiscent of the treatment of composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday in Amsterdam. That novel was McEwan’s only Booker-winner, though he has been shortlisted several times. I’ve written about it before.

Other McEwan protagonists with whom Michael Beard has something in common are Enduring Love’s Joe Rose, the successful popularizer of science who finds that his former field has moved on too quickly and too far for him to be able to return to serious scientific work, and Henry Perowne, a brain surgeon whose daughter and father-in-law are both poets, but who is suspicious of the devices he thinks are characteristic of postmodern fiction.

If all goes according to plan, the next post from Talk about books, in two weeks’ time, will also feature a Nobel laureate who turns out to have feet of clay.

Edition: Vintage paperback, 2011.