Ian McEwan's Solar: it's green and it should be read

At last, global warming inspires good fiction. And scientists are the rightful heroes

Nick Cohen
The Observer, Sunday 14 March 2010

Gossip columnists long ago supplanted the literary editors in media hierarchies, and a writer must be grateful if the press greets the publication of his or her book with anything so quaint as a discussion of its literary merit. When Martin Amis released The Pregnant Widow in February, he discovered that the big issue for journalists was not how he expressed his ideas but whether he had upset Anna Ford. The former newsreader proved she is not at her best when the autocue is off by accusing him of smoking in the hospital room where her husband was dying in 1988 – he didn't, apparently – and of being a neglectful godfather to her daughter, a charge that even if true had nothing to do with his book.
After this, Ian McEwan must be grateful that Angela Rippon is not greeting the publication of Solar by announcing that he stood her up on a date in 1976, or that Fiona Bruce is not telling the papers he snubbed her at a dinner party during Blair's first term.
The "story" about McEwan nevertheless remains as irrelevant to his fiction as the babbling about whether the atheist Amis was a good godfather. Inspired by the Sunday Times, the pack has decided that McEwan is satirising a voyage in which he accompanied Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and other enlightened artists to see the effect of global warming in the Arctic.
McEwan does indeed acknowledge his debt to the Cape Farewell expedition, and includes a scene in which the cynical hero contrasts the idealistic conversation of his progressive companions when they are together at dinner with the naked selfishness with which they steal each other's gloves, scarves and helmets in the ship's boot room. "Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs," says Michael Beard. "Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin… How were they to save the Earth when it was so much larger than the boot room?"
As scoops go, however, the hacks' effort was five years late – and so did not even qualify as yesterday's news. When he returned from the Arctic in 2005, McEwan made the contrast between the highmindedness of the dinner table and the low scramble for petty advantage in the boot room in a speech you can still find on the internet. More pertinently, he understands that the contradiction is at the heart of contemporary environmental concerns. Far from mocking fears about climate change, McEwan is struggling to find a way to write them.
Opposition to global warming has been a good cause which has failed to inspire good fiction. I do not claim encyclopaedic knowledge, but Solar is the first novel I have read to tackle it successfully. The difficulty was that there appeared to be no space for any emotion except despair. If Europe slashed its carbon emissions, would America reciprocate? Even if it did, how could you persuade one billion Chinese consumers not to buy cars or hundreds of millions of Indians and Africans to abandon self-enrichment? The campaign against climate change ran against the grain of human nature.
McEwan has found a way out by turning to the pioneering green thinkers James Lovelock and Stewart Brand, who have been begging environmentalists to stand their old opposition to technology on its head. They want them to see nuclear power, mega-cities and GM food as innovations that can slow down emissions. To put it another way, they hope to use 21st-century science to limit the damage caused by 19th and 20th-century science.
McEwan tells me that he prefers technicians to humanities graduates who spout apocalyptic predictions. He sniffs in some the same fanaticism that inspired millenarian religion, communism and fascism, and suspects they want to compensate for the knowledge of the inevitability of their own deaths by imagining that the species will go down with them.
The optimism – and it may be a false optimism – new technologies bring allows McEwan to create a protagonist who is not an impossibly righteous hero or the gritty survivor of a coming catastrophe but an all too fleshy adulterer and glutton. Michael Beard is a Nobel Laureate whose glory days are long gone. He steals the work of an equally lecherous colleague, who dies, appropriately, by slipping on a polar bear-skin rug. Beard realises the robbed research could create a new source of clean energy and goes on a slob's progress through the arguments against global warming as he tries to cash in.
When his American business partner wonders if the denialists of the Tea Party movement may be right, Beard delivers a devastating account of the arguments for manmade global warming, which ends with the unanswerable point that in the unlikely event of the vast majority of qualified scientists being wrong, we'll be hitting peak oil soon and will need alternative energy anyway. He neatly illuminates the link between Palinism and postmodernism by forcing Beard to endure an audience at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, which bellows that his so-called science is nothing but a "social construct" designed to preserve the "hegemonic arrogance" of the "white male elite". My colleagues should note that McEwan shows that the ICA rather than the Cape Farewell project has been the true butt of satirists ever since Amis invited its relativist crowd to raise their hands if they thought they were morally superior to the Taliban and only one third did. ("So many?" I hear you gasp. Yes, I was surprised too.)
The novel's burning question comes when Beard asks an audience of City investors, "How can we slow down and stop while sustaining our civilisation and continuing to bring millions out of poverty? Not by being virtuous… For humanity en masse, greed trumps virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention [and] the pleasures of ingenuity."
McEwan attempts the difficult trick of blending raucous comedy with science and politics. I think he pulls it off magnificently. But given the current state of British criticism, I accept that you may want to hear what the newsreaders have to say before deciding for yourselves.