A cosmic comedy

Not long ago I had an email from a friend, wondering if I’d yet read the new Ian McEwan.

Not long ago I had an email from a friend, wondering if I’d yet read the new Ian McEwan. ‘Talk about a bolt from the blue,’ she said. ‘McEwan does slapstick. I never saw that coming.’ She added (unfairly, I thought) that you might class On Chesil Beach as slapstick of an unintentional sort, but her point holds. Here, in a book around a scientific theme of considerable seriousness — global warming and renewable energy — McEwan has written the closest thing he’s ever done to a farce.

Told in three chunks, spaced at intervals between 2000 and 2009, Solar is the story of a Nobel-prize-winning physicist on a slow slide to disaster. As a young man, Michael Beard won the Nobel Prize for a discovery about the interaction between matter and light called the Beard-Einstein Conflation.