Ian McEwan.
Scene One
- Potsdam, Germany
- Fall 2007
The great and glorious gathered in the German city to discuss climate change in the autumn of 2007, settling in after their supper to listen to a slender man with thinning grey hair and a tendency to feline smiles. He was being offered, in his mind, as "an after-dinner mint." He was the only person to address the room who had not won a Nobel Prize - the conference's weighty title, Global Sustainability: A Nobel Cause, nodded to the attendees' accomplishments.
Ian McEwan surveyed his black-tie audience, thinking to himself that they looked like a colony of great, elderly penguins. Until this point the only Nobel laureates he'd known were poets or playwrights, modest, unassuming men. These scientists and mathematicians were different; some were grumpy, others charming, but all were grand, self-important, heavy with the weight of their reputations and intellectual achievement. McEwan watched them but his mind was on his next novel, as a writer's always is. He had found a key. In his next book, he thought, the main character is going to have a Nobel Prize.
And so was born Michael Beard, the (anti-) hero of McEwan's new book Solar, a fat, philandering, potato-chip loving physicist with all his glory behind him and nothing but trouble ahead. A Nobel win for his work on photovoltaics while still in his twenties did not help Beard become any more noble.
While Solar has been labelled a climate-change novel - Beard is developing an artificial photosynthesis process, using stolen research - it's really about the weakness of human nature, the missing rungs between our best intentions and our feeble actions.
"We are all made of crooked grain," says McEwan, 61, with one of those feline smiles. "We're funny and horrifying by equal turns. But I'd say the spirit of the book is benign tolerance." He's sitting in the living room of his lovely, quiet house in central London, with its dark, slightly sinister artwork and its weighty reading material (Colm Toibin, the Times Literary Supplement). It's almost a parody of a serious writer's house: How nice it would be to show up and find the table littered with copies of Hello! Magazine and a half-finished Slurpee.
But McEwan's writing is not merely drawn in shades of black, as his early nickname "Ian Macabre," would suggest. There's always been humour in his novels. ( The Innocent, for example, contains one of literature's funniest accounts of chopping up a human body.) Solar is definitely on the comic end of the spectrum. Its author realized early on that "a novel that's going to bemoan our fate and beat the reader around the shoulders is going to die under its moral weight." Laughter was the way through: In Solar, someone almost loses his manhood to frostbite and someone else is ushered to his death by a bearskin rug, to great comic effect. Well, it is an Ian McEwan novel.
Scene Two
- Spitsbergen, Norway, just north of the 79th parallel
- March 2005
There was chaos in the ship's boot room. McEwan couldn't find his boots or gloves - how could he go outside and make snow sculptures in minus 30 temperatures if someone pinched his gear?
Aboard the ship Noorderlicht, locked in the ice at the top of Norway, McEwan was one of a dozen artists invited by the Cape Farewell project to visit the far north and ponder the effects of climate change. Instead, McEwan pondered where his stuff had gone, which of his high-minded fellow travellers had walked off with it, and how could it ever be possible to put the planet in order when fewer than two dozen people - much-honoured sculptors, decorated choreographers - couldn't even keep one room tidy, and their mitts to themselves? One of the first of his novel's puzzles had been unlocked.
"Everyone was aware of the paradoxes by which we all had to consume a great deal of energy to be kept alive in the cold," McEwan says, "and everyone knew that there was a sort of dissonance between the idealism of our talk and the ballooning chaos of the boot room."
It was too good a metaphor not to store for use later: In Solar, Michael Beard, caring little about climate change or art, on the run from his fifth divorce and various acts of larceny, watches the disintegration: "Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition… Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin." (If you're to believe reports in the British press, always a dangerous prospect, some of McEwan's Cape Farewell colleagues were less than gruntled about this satirical response.)
Best not to mention the British press at all, who are also lampooned in Solar, and are probably nightly going through his recycling boxes to ensure that his cardboard and lettuce leaves don't touch. The press has been a sore spot since a trumped-up controversy over whether the novelist borrowed some historical facts from a Second World War memoir for his 2001 bestseller, Atonement.
"Rackety" is McEwan's word for the tabloid press, and he uses it again to describe the increasingly polarized debate around climate change. Like it or not, his novel has arrived at a white-hot time. There's the controversy over flawed glacier data, as well as the furor over e-mails at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (the school where McEwan studied creative writing, incidentally, after discarding the idea of becoming a scientist.) Polls show that belief in global warming is slipping, despite all the evidence to the contrary. As he was finishing Solar, the Copenhagen conference was staggering to its ineffectual finish, and McEwan changed the ending of his novel to reflect it.
"The world has become a lot more argumentative and rackety and instant," he says. "Climate-change debate has become tinged with road rage, especially on the denialist side." It's a combustible time. Bad news for the planet, probably. Good news for a novelist.
Scene Three
- Lordsburg, New Mexico
- 2009
As he drove around the deserts of the U.S. southwest, McEwan was halfway through the story of Michael Beard and still had no idea where it would go. Aspiring writers, take note: Even novelists with 13 titles under their belts and shelves full of shiny trophies sometimes flail in the depths. Writing each book, McEwan says, is "like learning to swim all over again."
Then he came upon Lordsburg, population 3,390, tucked in the bottom corner of New Mexico, and knew that this was where all of Michael Beard's travails and sorrows and skirt-chasing would end in a perfect, stabbing point. McEwan found a charming family restaurant that he particularly liked, which, in fictional form, became the refuge for Beard's monstrous appetites, in one memorable feast.
"Did you like that?" he says, laughing. "That meal was completely invented! Layers of chicken, interspersed with steak, wrapped in bacon, smothered in cheese." McEwan admits to a weakness for the restaurant's double-baked potatoes - "stuffed with cholesterol, and then more cholesterol poured on top." We're all at war with our better selves.
There's likely another reason why McEwan chose to end the novel in New Mexico; it was the birthplace of the atomic bomb. As a youngster, like many of the duck-and-cover generation, he was preoccupied with the threat of nuclear war. One of the threads running through Solar is the idea that every civilization becomes obsessed with the apocalypse, and harbours a solipsistic belief that it will be the last to inhabit the planet. Climate change is only the latest knife hanging over our heads.
"We like to think we're living in darkest days. People do feel a satisfaction that their own end is tied up with the end of the world -- perhaps it gives a bit more meaning to our existence." It's clear which side of the debate McEwan falls on, but he's no proselytizer. There is enough of the latent scientist in him to resist the call to melodrama: "You have to careful you're not just stroking yourself with the idea that the Earth is as mortal as you are."