On my way back from a week in London working on climate change, and the bilateral relationship between the UK and Colombia on this issue, I read Ian McEwan's latest novel -- a 'climate change novel' -- Solar, from cover to cover.
I'd been looking forward to reading it ever since it was published in 2010. Indeed, when McEwan was here in Colombia, at the Hay Festival's Cartagena festival, he spoke compellingly about Solar and about the circumstances of its inception.
Invited on a boat trip in 2005 with a group of artists and thinkers to the Arctic, to see the polar ice melting, McEwan noted with ironic glee how in the course of the week, the storage room on the boat where the group kept their winter clothes (hats, thermals, boots, glasses, etc.) became more and more chaotic -- such that, within days, everybody had lost their kit, and all were obliged effectively to steal bits of their companions' get-up (the odd glove here or there) in order to be able to participate in the daily expeditions. Chaos reigned, in what seemed to be the most simple of challenges: assuring the common good in a group of fifteen for the purposes of the voyage on which they had embarked.
By night, nonetheless, McEwan recounted to large audiences in Bogotá and Cartagena, his group would engage in lengthy, earnest, well-intentioned discussions over their dinner and plentiful wine on the boat about climate change: cap and trade mechanisms; global frameworks; contraction and convergence; domestic legislation; and all the rest.
The gap between the grandiosity of the global ambition, absolutely necessary in order to mitigate a global problem; and, in a sense, the realities of human nature, seemed to be eloquently epitomised in the author's experience on the boat.
In the novel, the void between our global predicament and the human response is also comically set out. The main character, our hero, or anti-hero, is (implausibly) a Nobel-prize winning scientist, who runs a climate change research centre near Reading. His personal life, however, is chaotic, caught as he is between wives and lovers, past and present, and increasingly entangled in a web of half-truths and lies on the academic front too. A reprehensible character, perhaps, but an engaging and very lifelike one, whose misdemeanours fill the pages and form the core of the plot.
The writing is characteristically excellent: astute, humorous, sharp, unforgiving, wry. McEwan gives ample space to the science too, such that there are passages, dialogues and debates on climate change in the novel which really bring the issue to life, and should be required reading for devotees and sceptics alike. Never have the advantages of solar photovoltaics over wind turbines on the rooftops of individual houses been so compellingly set out as in the pages of this novel...
Perhaps deliberately, and despite the humour, I found the novel ultimately quite troubling and depressing: human beings, human nature, are found wanting faced with the magnitude of the challenge we face (and of our own creation), seemed to be the message, if indeed there is a message. Doubtless reading the novel in one fell swoop in a plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean, belching fumes and water vapour into the blue skies, compounded the helpless feeling.
Still, it's well worth reading: and if haven't yet read it, and need convincing, it's worth looking at the following links too:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/13/solar-ian-mcewan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/14/ian-mcewan-environment-novel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/26/solar-ian-mcewan-lezard-review
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article7050338.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/jan/13/ian-mcewan-copenhagen-solar-video
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7359254/Solar-by-Ian-McEwan-review.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/books/30book.html
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