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 PrintableVersion SolarShelf life: Looking at secular booksSOLAR Michael Beard, the protagonist of Solar, is a memorable creation: a philandering, greedy academic resting on his Nobel Prize reputation. Heading a Centre for Renewable Energy, a field in which he has little interest or conviction, Beard is a comic contrast to the earnest but inefficient eco-warriors he meets. As Ian McEwan said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, ‘There’s something comic about idealism, and our capacity for rational thinking and gathering data and evidence on the one hand, and on the other these little worms of self-interest, laziness and innate chaos’. And this is the heart of McEwan’s new novel. It is not a book about climate change, but a book about the people who have brought about climate change and those seeking to address it. Hubris and greedBy using an unattractive anti-hero, McEwan makes this a book which, through exploring the world of climate-change science, reveals the hubris and greed of human nature. As the novel progresses, farce and an almost Swiftian satire combine to dark effects. Beard plagirises the work of a protege who dies in his home and ends up with the recipe for creating truly clean energy through a type of artificial photosynthesis. He reinvents himself as a green investor, saving the world through his invention, but consuming more and more himself. The increasingly sensuous descriptions of Beard’s food (‘cubes of belly pork’) and less and less inhibited lechery become nauseating; he is greedy for reputation and wealth as well, near the end of the book comforting his fellow investor with these words: ‘Here’s the good news. The UN estimates that already a third of a million people a year are dying from climate change… Toby, listen. It’s a catastrophe. Relax!’ Wearying ironyThis is a (largely) well-written and well-plotted book, with twists even up to Beard’s inevitable implosion. Yet I think the irony is too great, Beard so unbelievable that I didn’t actually laugh. The above quotation stands as an example of the overworked satire; it would be great in a sketch, but as a 300-page novel I found it wearying. More than that, throughout the novel there are no truly sympathetic characters because the narration stays so close to Beard. This is certainly a morality tale; greed is ugly and destructive, it tells us. And then what? As satire it leaves the reader with no hope, just a bitter taste in the mouth. Praise the Lord that Christians have a much more pessimistic view of greed (idolatry, of course) than even this book and an answer to such a deep-rooted evil: worship! Sarah Allen© Evangelicals Now - May 2010 |
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