SOLAR
By Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape. 304 pages. £18.00
ISBN 978-0-22409-049-0
Michael Beard, the protagonist of Solar, is a memorable creation: a philandering, greedy academic resting on his Nobel Prize reputation.
Heading a Centre for Renewable Energy, a field in which he has little interest or conviction, Beard is a comic contrast to the earnest but inefficient eco-warriors he meets. As Ian McEwan said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, ‘There’s something comic about idealism, and our capacity for rational thinking and gathering data and evidence on the one hand, and on the other these little worms of self-interest, laziness and innate chaos’. And this is the heart of McEwan’s new novel. It is not a book about climate change, but a book about the people who have brought about climate change and those seeking to address it.
Misogyny, rights & Rowling
It might have seemed as if the isolation of lockdown was making people mad last month when the stars of …