More light than heat

Solar By Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape, 285pp, $32.95

UNLESS you still believe the Earth is flat, this much is incontestable: since the beginning of the industrial revolution, humans have burned fossil fuels in ever greater amounts.

 This has led, in turn, to a rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas always present in our atmosphere, to levels not seen for 15 million years. According to a study published in online journal Science:

The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today - and were sustained at those levels - global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet [22m-36m] higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.

It is against this apocalyptic backdrop that Solar, loudly marketed as Ian McEwan's climate change novel, makes its appearance, presumably to be welcomed as a wise and timely intervention by England's pre-eminent man of letters in the increasingly febrile debate about how to deal with this potentially existential threat.

The buzz is misleading. Solar is neither a helpful contribution to the conundrum of global warming nor successful fiction. An odd, desultory production, by turns pompous and feebly comic, Solar is McEwan's weakest novel since Amsterdam in 1998: an object-lesson in how impotent literature can be in the face of real-world challenges.

Part of the problem is the repellent personality of the man at the centre of Solar's fictional universe. Englishman Michael Beard may have won a Nobel prize for his groundbreaking work as a young man in the field of theoretical physics, but when the novel opens he is already long past his prime. Beard is obese, a glutton for food, wine and women, and his fifth marriage is dead on its feet because of his serial indiscretions. His wife is returning the favour by having a very open affair with a builder.

In public, this haughty and conceited man keeps up a dignified front. He occupies a well-paid government post, heading a renewable energy institute set up with negligible funding as a sop to the concerned citizens of Britain, even though he privately dismisses the science of climate change.

One of the post-docs under his charge is the intense and brilliant young Tom Aldous, fiercely engaged with finding a means to combat global warming and fiercely engaged with Beard's wayward spouse. Above and beyond this cliched account of adultery in Hampstead is Aldous's private research: papers that, having landed in Beard's lap, suggest to the scientist a way of saving the world that will also make him very rich. The most notable thing about Beard's stolen eureka is how little it alters the trajectory of his life. As the narrative jumps through the following decade - and as we readers are reminded of the wasted years, the stalled initiatives, the treaties unsigned - Beard is trapped in an essential solipsism. He is a grotesque everyman whose greed and unwillingness to face up to the consequences of his actions is so great as to be suicidal.

This is no doubt intentional. Maybe McEwan is wary of seeming bombastic or doctrinaire. Perhaps he is disgusted by political deadlock and public indifference in the face of scientific evidence, or simply awed by the scale of the unfolding catastrophe that this same science points towards. For whatever reason, he has consciously set out to reduce the cosmic tragedy of mass extinction of life on Earth into domestic farce, in which a fat cuckold takes his slobbering revenge as the planet burns.

The final effect is ruinous. As the narrative shunts forward, tracing Beard's efforts to bring Aldous's theories to practical fruition, McEwan tries to wring comedy from the disjunction between Beard's low motives and his utopian plans for harvesting the "sweet rain of photons" that fall on the Earth in the form of solar rays and converting light into a free supply of safe energy.

But McEwan's wit lacks the necessary bite. When, on a sponsored research trip to the North Pole, the hung-over scientist makes an unscheduled stop to urinate in the teeth of an approaching blizzard, his penis becomes stuck to the zipper of his snowsuit. Back on the snowmobile, Beard mistakes a dislodged tube lip-salve for his frozen, detached member. Later, addressing a conference of fossil fuel bigwigs in London, Beard makes a plea for funding while fighting off the effects of some tainted salmon; as the crowd claps, he throws up behind a curtain before taking his bow.

Once, McEwan's transgressions would have shocked; now, they sound like smutty jokes, prosaic and humourless. Beard is hardly some larger-than-life character out of Saul Bellow: sealed in the blubber of his self-regard, the scientist squats on the novel until even McEwan's isolated pockets of serious, urgent and powerful prose are flattened out.

Solar shows that the gap between McEwan's early work and his later has widened to a chasm. Honours and years passed have seen McEwan harden into a statue: a monument to his own success.

Despite this, there can be no doubt that McEwan's voice remains elegant, sane and engaged with the world. The failure is not just his; it points to broader limitations the novel displays when faced with climate change. A form dedicated to the human, the social, can only gesture towards a world in which the human and the social cease to exist. Fiction can only make us drowsy with its comforting narratives. If, however, the plurality of climate scientists are correct in their predictions, what we need most is form that can describe the sounds that will come after we have fallen silent.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.