Solar by Ian McEwan

Solar by Ian McEwan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Professor Michael Beard is a thoroughly unpleasant fellow.

Short, fat, balding and a serial philanderer, he is approaching the end of his fifth marriage with mixed feelings. His one achievement in life was a startlingly brilliant insight into quantum theory (the Beard-Einstein Conflation) that earned him a Nobel prize, but his subsequent career has ended up being little more than a series of plodding administrative jobs and dull sinecures where he is only employed so that his name and qualification can be quoted on the letter heads. By accident rather than design he finds himself in nominal charge of an institute investigating climate change and alternative sources of energy. Can he actually make a difference, and does he even want to when the young scientists doing the actual work all seem to have pony-tails and an air of evangelical fervour about them?

This book charts Beard's career as he stumbles across a theory that builds on his own discovery and promises a cheap, clean and potentially limitless source of energy, and contrasts it with his own venality and personal shortcomings in his various relationships. It is very funny in places, particularly on a 'fact finding' mission to the Arctic that descends into farce when the various idealists and dreamers can't even manage to organise their cold weather gear in the boot room of their accommodation, never mind save the planet. In other places, the book takes some very dark turns, not least in Beard's self-justification of some of his reprehensible behaviour.

It is an entertaining read, particularly in the light of the recent 'Climategate' non-scandal, where researchers pondered how best to present their findings to a woefully ignorant public. If scientists are not moral paragons, that doesn't necessarily detract from the value of their work. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, everybody is standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before, and thus we make progress in our understanding of the universe.

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