Word: mcewan
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...turns out, they might want to wait for Al Gore's next book. McEwan has turned his sharp, satirical eye to climate change, and the result is anything but heroic. In making Solar a comedy - albeit one as black as the dark side of the moon - McEwan gives the lie to vain hopes that the planet will be saved by a sudden outbreak of environmental virtue. If we're going to avoid choking on what McEwan calls the "hot breath of civilization," we're going to have to harness human nature, in all its selfishness, mendacity - and occasional genius...
...decades ago. As Solar begins, Beard is in the waning days of his fifth marriage, hanging on as the chief of a government center on renewable energy, where climate change takes up less space in his mind than adultery. "Beard was not wholly skeptical about climate change," McEwan writes. "But he himself had other things to think about." (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...Norwegian Arctic with a boat full of self-important artists and scientists going north to see global warming in action. The journey is hilarious: Beard suffers frostbite in a rather uncomfortable place and is very nearly eaten by a polar bear. But even better is the way McEwan deftly contrasts the high ideals of the travelers - who call for a new, greener way of life - with their unacknowledged selfishness. The ship's boot room, where people load and unload their polar gear, and which steadily descends into chaos, becomes a symbol of humanity's problems with planetary management. "How were...
...provide cheap, clean electricity. The earth will be saved, as will Beard's flagging career (and bank account). An unrepentant narcissist at heart, Beard has no trouble transitioning from disinterested physicist to clean-energy messiah, addressing conference halls full of skeptical businesspeople. "Now planetary stupidity was his business," McEwan writes - a slogan I should really put on the back of my business cards...
...Artificial photosynthesis is a real idea, although it's further from deployment than the novel suggests. McEwan's background research is so seamlessly displayed that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - busy working on the same topic - might wonder if he's nicked their notes. But where Solar really succeeds - beyond the dark comedy, too long missing in McEwan's gentler recent work - is the author's ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist. Beard is a Nobel Prize - winning mess, an obese man who can't stop eating...