Solar by Ian McEwan

Solar is a story of greed for gratification on a scale that refuses to allow any transgression by ‘love’ or ‘commitment’. Michael Beard, a Nobel laureate and a much heralded genius is also a much married man. His five marriages have floundered without making him a father, a result neither of incapacity nor abstinence but purely of disinclination. As the curtain rises, his fifth marriage is staring at The End and, for a change, it is his wife’s indiscretion that is bringing it about.

But even the staid lives of scientists are not always bereft of drama; a sudden turn of events – dramatic even in its ordinariness (a man tripping over a rug) – sets off choices for Beard that appear to provide solutions to his somewhat messy life. I must take a break from recounting the bare bones of this tale to add that it is precisely under the cloak of such ordinary moments that Ian McEwan tends to hide the tale that he then unleashes on unsuspecting dramatis personae and the reader. Who does not recall the tipping of the porcelain jar into a shallow fountain in Atonement or the slight brush between a doctor and street-side ruffians in Saturday or the accidental unshackling of the hot-air balloon in Enduring Love? In each case, what followed so credibly from the turn of events could hardly have been predicted.

In case of Michael Beard several arrows appear to be closing in on him in a small desert town in Southern US, where he has arrived to unveil his latest and perhaps last magnum-opus – a project to produce electricity from water. None of the arrows is benign and none entirely misses the mark. Yet, in the moment of his catastrophic defeat, for one fleeting moment, Beard experiences an unexpected emotion that even he could not have suspected of possessing.

Ian McEwan draws Beard with great dexterity – there is no reason why we should not loathe the man and yet we might not. He deserves no sympathy, of course; but we might be forgiven if that impulse arises at the very end.

It is another masterpiece – satirical, funny and suspenseful.