I’m really enjoying Solar, Ian McEwan’s latest book about a narcissistic, overweight, and lecherous Nobel Prize-winning physics professor Michael Beard. It’s definitely impressive that McEwan doesn’t skimp out on the details of physics or green technology. I can’t vouch for how accurate or true they may be, but things surely do sound technical and gives the impression that a lot of research has been done for this book. It’s very much like Saturday, McEwan’s book about a life in the day of a successful neurosurgeon, in the probing of the minute details of the main character’s personal activities and his work. But Beard is cast as a vile slob for most of the story unlike the svelte and scandal-free Henry Perowne, and this makes for a funnier, more piercing read.
As McEwan immerses himself in various worlds for his books — wartime battle in Atonement, medicine in Saturday, science in Solar – I can’t help but to think that some of the knowledge gained from an earlier book seeps into later ones. In Solar, a description of a running Beard, late to a speaking engagement, has a distinctly medical observation, as if some prose has held over from Saturday:
Inside a minute, he was troubled by a narrow stab of pain in his chest, deep in some neglected lower region of his left lung, among the less frequented alveoli, and he slowed.
I’m going to end with a poor baseball analogy: While sharp observation of human flaws and relationships remain central to McEwan’s writing, much like a batter with a good eye, his meticulous research and penchant for the technical, something not present in his earlier work, has become his steroids — his stories now go more in-depth and further into areas that less committed authors might shy away from, allowing for some richly developed worlds and, sometimes, some showboating.
Filed under: Fiction
