Ian McEwan - Solar

Ian McEwan, Solar (Jonathan Cape)

Coming to this after reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it was immediately enjoyable to be reading fine writing by one of the foremost English fiction writers of our times. No disrespect to the Larsson book but it has other ways of entertaining and is a translation anyway. I appreciated the glimpse offered of Larsson's original when the protagonist ate an 'open sandwich' and assumed I'd seen the original word, 'smorgasbord', but it is not a literary book as such.
But Solar becomes a thriller, too, in its later stages as several threads come together in a terrible unravelling.
Michael Beard is a thoroughly dissolute wreck, a serial philanderer in a state of bad physical repair, living on his reputation as Nobel Physics laureate with his own best work long behind him. And so he steals the work of a junior having inadvertently witnessed his death and sent his wife's lover to jail for the 'murder' through a set of conveniently convincing circumstances.
One needs to dissociate the unattractive main character from the quality of the prose because one can find the words softening the unreconstructed brutishness of the man. And, along with the extraordinary circumstances of the death, there are other elements that stretch credibility a little more. Like, would one, however desperate, remove so many layers of clothing to relieve oneself in the many degrees below zero of the outdoors in the Arctic, and is the passage intended as comic or to illustrate the character of the man. And would a Nobel laureate really be involved in a relationship with a middle-aged waitress, Darlene (possibly taken straight from the lady Homer nearly has an affair with in The Simpsons), who lives in a trailer in New Mexico. Perhaps Beard's sexual appetite and habit knows no such restrictions of social class.
But, the disparate sub-plots are brought together, and combined with some apparently convincing science on climate change and energy resources to ultimately provide a satisfying novel. At its best, McEwan's prose has an aspect of poetry to it, as when describing the subsequent marriage of his fifth ex-wife, Patrice,
Interesting, that Charles was short, plump and had even less hair than Beard and was two years older. As if marriages were a series of corrected drafts.
And it's not only in his phrasing or metaphor that McEwan does much more than show and describe. Time and again, he provides commentary on contemporary culture, like the fashions sold in Melissa's dance shop, or insights into the low motives of the human world, whether when Beard becomes a subject of media attention or the saving of the world as a profit-driven project and no more than that.
It wouldn't be for me to say that McEwan is the very best of his generation of English fiction writers because I haven't read enough of the opposition. This book isn't as complete and wonderful as Atonement or the novella On Chesil Beach but it is excellent despite my reservations. Its science is accessible, its psychology is well observed and its construction turns out to be well-made even if it did appear to be slightly episodic at halfway. The fact that it turns out to be nearly as much of a thriller as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is actually a bonus, and, as with the ending of Chesil Beach, I wasn't sure how it would end until it did.