There's something about a few lines into the opening of Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar , that conjured for me the opening paragraph of Jane Austen's Emma :
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
I found the parallel wasn't perfect on second glance,
But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic, stricken.
Earlier in the opening, Beard is: "vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever."
The contrast is striking. Emma is a clever woman who has done nothing, while Beard is a Nobel laureate who has done entirely too much. But I suspect McEwan might echo Austen's sentiment about Emma, "I'm going to make a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." Daring for a woman to say in the early 19th century, while bog standard pretty much any time else, including for McEwan.
But in the same way that the opening to Emma tells you much about what is going to happen in the novel, so does the opening in Solar prefigure the chief metaphor of the novel: Beard is the First World.
Beard is the Occidental, staid and technically focused, that engages in increasingly unsatisfying excess to his destruction. He eats and drinks alcohol like a competitive eater and boozer, sometimes considering the taste, though is usually more interested in the quantity. There are multiple episodes on which he is on the verge of vomiting. He constantly gains weight and is starting to see the later stages of cardiovascular disease.
And his gluttony is only the beginning of his ills. Beard is an addict to food, to sex, and to professional reputation and success. He takes surprisingly little pleasure in his addictions and enjoys most the process of others suffering for him and cleaning up his messes. He keeps an apartment himself that gradually decays into uninhabitability.
In a moment that would make Rev. Sam shudder, he discusses peak oil and climate change as problems unassailable by reducing consumption or as he also terms it, virtue. Instead, he urges a group of institutional investors to fund his technological fix, solar power that imitates photosynthesizing plants (a genuine technology being explored by acquaintances of mine), because a new economy is necessary and their greed should be sufficient to make it reality.
Without giving away the denouement completely, vice is ultimately punished. There is something suitably Victorian about the novel in that sense. And with Beard's doom, McEwan seems to herald our own.
In the course of this rake's progress, the novel is readable, though not entrancing. The irony is sometimes too delicious. Beard makes a few ill-considered remarks about why there are so few women physicists. The climax of his public shaming is a debate with a series of white male humanities professors critiquing his "hegemonic" place or his white male privilege in more familiar terms. They also claim that there are no objective truths and that even gravity is socially constructed, to the approbation of a leftist postmodernist audience. Yet Beard's true foil is a cognitive psychologist from Tel Aviv, who uses quite convincing research results to show that gender differences in physics ability are due to cultural conditioning. Beard is willing to concede the error of his thinking, but the audience does not care, believing the foil to be complicit in the atrocity of Palestinian containment just because she is Israeli.
And sometimes McEwan is just a little too obsessed with meta-discourse, in which an event that occurs to Beard is identified as folkloric trope on retelling to a folklorist. But then the reader thinks, "Ah, I am reading a novel, so it is a folkloric trope all along. Ha, ha, ha, ha." I think McEwan was trying to make a point about how prophecies of doom aren't just a folkloric trope but that doom is sometimes objective reality, but it fell flat.
What disturbs me most is that there isn't a place for virtue either. The closest thing we see to virtuous is a Christian couple who study theology, raise identical twins as best they can, and divvy up the chores as equally as they can, including prayer and meditation. We hear little about them, but they seem anything but happy. Vice will be punished, yes, but virtue is not worth much detailed consideration. Inadvertently, McEwan may have summarized the course of the 21st century.
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