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. That hyphen — at once linking his name to Einstein and marking him as an appendage to a greater man — is tormenting.

Now Beard is short and stocky and his hair is thinning. He is coasting on his reputation; he sits on boards and lends the glow of the Swedish Academy to letterheads. Currently, he’s running a centre where they’re trying to design a wind-turbine for domestic use.

But he is no longer on the cutting edge, and the enthusiasms of his geeky assistants are an irritant rather than an inspiration. Front and centre in his mind is not physics but the fact that his young and beautiful fifth wife is quite openly schtupping the builder. And despite his own heroic history of infidelities, Beard minds very much about this.