Solar by Ian McEwan – Book Club Facilitating Notes

Can a despicable character make a good protagonist?

Jaded, bloated, resting on his laurels, consuming alcohol, food and women in excess, former Nobel Prize winning physicist Michael Beard now makes a living by plying the conference circuit and lending his name for the boards of different scientific organizations, even though he hasn't done any significant work in years.

That all changes when, in typical McEwan style, a circumstantial incident sets into motion an intricate chain of events that transforms our antihero into a champion for the cause of global warming… not that he becomes any more sympathetic on the way.

The narrative barrels along with wry observation, evocative description, yuk yuk humor, and a stern warning for humanity about what we have become and how we are treating our planet (and each other). If the main character had been more likeable, the book would have been preachy and lame. But since we can distance ourselves from the appalling Michael Beard, he serves as a marvellous vehicle to take us through this examination of bloated consumer society in denial about the consequences of its actions: Michael Beard represents the worst of humanity and he is pointing the finger right back at us.

Book Club Facilitating Notes:
1. My review
2. Ian McEwan biography
3. Solar Plot summary
4. A couple of other reviews.
5. Discussion Questions
6. The book's ending and the change McEwan made following the Copenhagen conference.
7. Reading Guide discussion questions

2. Biography

Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday, and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize.

McEwan lives in London. His most recent novel is Solar.
From Ian McEwan's website: http://www.ianmcewan.com/
The website contains considerable information by and about Ian McEwan, who has apparently been the subjects of an impressive number of articles, reviews, and studies.

Mr. McEwan spent his childhood on army bases, mostly in Libya, where his father, a career officer, was posted. He began writing fiction while getting a masters' degree in English literature at England's University of East Anglia, and published his first collection of short stories in 1975. He became known internationally for his 1998 novel "Amsterdam," about a composer and a newspaper editor, which won the Man Booker Prize. He lives in a town house in London's Fitzroy Square with his second wife, journalist Annalena McAfee (the pair met when she interviewed him for the Financial Times), and has two sons from his previous marriage who are in their 20s.

Mr. McEwan belongs to a literary cadre that includes his close friends Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens. Members of the group convene for occasional dinners (they've graduated from a kebab house where they gathered in the 1970s and '80s to a French restaurant). "He's a tremendously funny man, but apart from in 'Amsterdam,' he's kept it out of his fiction as a whole," Mr. Amis says. "In 'Solar' he lets it free."
From: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704117304575137993028761062.html

3. Plot summary

Solar approaches the largest and most important of themes—global warming—through the very particular lens of Michael Beard, a disheveled physicist floundering in the aftermath of a career that had brought him the Nobel Prize many years before.

As the novel begins, Beard's fifth marriage is unraveling. But this time, in a reversal of roles, it is because his wife is having an affair. Infidelities are Beard's stock-in-trade, but being cuckolded is a new and unsettling experience for him, and it seems part of larger downward trend in his life. He still speaks at conferences, lends his name to scientific institutions, and leads a government program devoted to developing clean energy. But he does all these things in a halfhearted way and is largely indifferent to the problem of global warming. That all changes when Aldous—an earnest postdoc who is passionate about both climate change and Beard's wife—enters the picture. After a freak accident, Beard is left with Aldous's ingenious plans for creating solar energy by imitating the process of photosynthesis. He sees a chance to reestablish his prominence as a physicist and save the world while he's at it.
http://www.bookbrowse.com/reading_guides/detail/index.cfm?book_number=2430


4. A couple of reviews and an interview

"What Climate Scientists Think of Ian McEwan's Solar Book"
Climate scientist (and consultant on McEwan's book) Stefan Rahmstorf writes a plaintively earnest review that addresses the use of humor to address a serious subject, science culture vs. social constructivists, and commends the accuracy of the science that McEwan presents.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/05/climate-scientists-ian-mcewan-solar

"Solar by Ian McEwan. Ian McEwan excels at climate science but his one-dimensional protagonist makes you shudder"
Jason Crowley's bitingly funny review reviles Solar's main character Michael Beard, and compares the book a several of McEwan's previous novels.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/14/solar-ian-mcewan

"Can Climate Change Be Funny?"
In Alexandra Alter's 25 March 2010 interview in the Wall Street Journal, McEwan talks about the difficulties in writing a book about global warming that doesn't sound preachy, his personal experience with media controversy, popular and literary fiction, and the art of being a writer. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704117304575137993028761062.html


5. Discussion Questions

What is your understanding of global warming: fact or fallacy?
Review the speech made to pension fund managers. Kindle Location 2107.

Ian McEwan's books often hinge on single, opportunistic moments? What is the moment in this book and why does it work? How much of a stretch of the imagination is it?

How does Beard end up championing the cause of global warming?

Could this novel have worked with a more sympathetic main character?
What are Beard's character flaws?

What does Beard represent in terms of contemporary society?
Does he change over the course of the novel?

What do you suppose climate scientists think about Solar?

Michael Beard sparks controversy with his comments about differences in male and female brains. Kindle Location 1856 and onward.
What do you think about social constructivism?
(McEwan has also been the target of media umbrage for making controversial statements about Islam.)


6. Summary of the book's ending
Beard is still ignoring the melanoma on his hand
Jock Braby from the center is suing over the patents and theft of Aldous's work.
Aldous's father bringing charges of theft and fraud.
(Beard sees Tarpin getting into Lawyer Barnard's car)
While at dinner Beard gets a call from Toby: Tarpin has smashed the panels
Toby Hammer is suing to protect himself from Beard's debts.
Melissa and Darlene arrive.

The Copenhagen Summit
2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference
The Copenhagen Accord was drafted by the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa on December 18, and judged a "meaningful agreement" by the United States government. It was "taken note of", but not "adopted", in a debate of all the participating countries the next day, and it was not passed unanimously. The document recognised that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the present day and that actions should be taken to keep any temperature increases to below 2°C. The document is not legally binding and does not contain any legally binding commitments for reducing CO2 emissions.

McEwan told the Guardian he watched the outcome of the Copenhagen summit in December "very closely and with some despair" and then went back to his novel, Solar, to rewrite a section a few pages from the end.

The end of the book is set in summer 2009, and McEwan introduced a scene in which Michael Beard, the chief protaganist and a Nobel-prize winning physicist, receives an email that invites him to address a meeting of foreign ministers at the coming summit. "I just slipped something in to reflect the spirit of sadness," he said. "Everything has collapsed around him [Beard] and he knows that Copenhagen will be just the place for him. It is where he would be heading to add his confusion to everybody else's."

Had the summit produced a successful deal, as McEwan wanted, Beard and his failures would not have fitted in. "I would not have wanted my man anywhere near it," said the author. "I didn't want him there, believe me."

Guardian article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/05/ian-mcewan-climate-copenhagen-solar


7. Reader's Guide Questions

1. Beard loves physics in part because he believes that it is "free of human taint" (p. 10). In what ways does the novel complicate this belief? In what sense is Beard's own work "tainted" by human entanglements?
2. The narrative structure of Solar is mostly chronological. What effects does McEwan achieve by occasionally departing from a straightforward chronological progression?
3. Beard claims he does not believe in the possibility of "profound inner change" (p. 77). Does he remain unchanged over the course of the novel?
4. How does McEwan manage to make Beard such a sympathetic character despite his many foibles? What are his most salient character flaws?
5. Why is Beard so attached to preserving what he calls his "unshareable core"? (p. 307). Why does he find it impossible to tell Melissa that he loves her? Why do his marriages keep falling apart?
6. In what ways is Solar a satirical novel? What are its main satirical targets? How, for example, do postmodernists come off in the book?
7. What are some of the funniest moments in Solar? How does McEwan create such brilliant comedic effects?
8. Look at the encounters between art and science in the novel, those occasions when Beard squares off with people from the humanities—novelists, folklorists, postmodern feminists, etc. Who gets the better of these confrontations? Is the book as a whole making a point through its depiction of these encounters?
9. What is the significance of the entropy in the boot room on board the ship that is holding the conference on climate change? What does this chaos and carelessness suggest about humanity's ability to stop global warming?
10. Beard has a remarkably clear conscience; he is largely untroubled by his affairs and deceits, his theft of Aldous's ideas, his framing of Tarpin, etc. Why is he so free of the guilt that might afflict most other men?
11. Several times during the course of the novel it appears that public infamy—born of journalists' insatiable desire for controversy and Beard's own willingness to step into it—will doom Beard's career. What enables him to emerge from these disasters relatively unscathed? Will he be as lucky getting out of the mess he's created at the very end of the book?
12. How surprising is the ending of the novel, particularly the final sentence? What is the swelling sensation that Beard feels in his heart as his daughter approaches him? What is likely to happen to Beard next?
13. How does the appendix containing the presentation speech for Beard's Nobel Prize alter the way Beard is finally viewed? Why would McEwan choose to attach this appendix to the body of the novel?
14.Solar is in many ways a picaresque and at times farcical novel, and yet it also engages a theme of major importance—global warming. What is the connection between personal and planetary catastrophe in the novel, between the meltdown of Beard's personal and professional life and the kind of greed, dishonesty, rationalization, and failure to face facts that has resulted in the climate crisis? What is the significance, in this context, of Beard's inability to moderate his eating habits and his sexual pursuits?
15. What does Solar contribute to our understanding of climate change?

http://www.bookbrowse.com/reading_guides/detail/index.cfm?book_number=2430

Meet the Authors 2: Emily Gravett, Sarfraz Manzoor, Ian McEwan, Mike Reid, and Wayuu authors

The afternoon session of the British Council Meet the Authors event on Friday 29 January, featured the following:

Emily Gravett
14:00-14:40 Emily Gravett, author and children’s illustrator whose works include Wolves, Orange Pear Apple Bear, Monkey and Me and The Odd Egg. Gravett is the winner of various prizes, including the Kate Greenaway Medal, the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize Bronze Award and the Booktrust Early Years Best Emerging Illustrator Award.


I arrived late for the afternoon sessions, which was too bad because I missed most of children's author and illustrator Emily Gravett's presentation. I had a chance to look at her books and they are creative and charming. Gravett's advice to a young people who like to draw and might be interested in a career as an illustrator: Draw every day. If there is something that you particularly like to draw, draw it in many different positions, from many different angles, so that you will develop a wide "drawing vocabulary."



Sarfraz Manzoor
15:00-15:40 Sarfraz Manzoor, British writer, journalist, documentary maker, and broadcaster. Manzoor writes regularly for The Guardian, presents documentaries on BBC Radio 4, and appears as a cultural commentator on programmes such as Newsnight Review and Saturday Review. His first book, Greetings from Bury Park was published to great acclaim in the summer of 2007.

Manzoor started his presentation by showing a little pocket notebook on which he had scribbled a few lines, and he confessed that during lunch this is what he had jotted down to talk about. I thought that confessing one's lack of preparation for a conference was an inauspicious way to begin, and not one likely to impress the audience. Some people are good speakers who can wing it… he, however, was not.

Manzoor's book Greetings from Bury Park is both a tribute to his father, who was absent for most of his life, and to Bruce Springsteen. It deals with growing up England as a man of Pakistani descent, and the experience of having a foot in each culture. The concept of living in a country where you are a foreigner is an experience with which Colombian families are familiar. If he had taken the time to put together a presentation that would be meaningful for the public at the conference, I am sure that he could have found some common ground for an interesting discussion.

He got his start as a writer by proposing articles to magazines and being pushy in emails, after all, as he noted, when you are an unknown you have nothing to lose. Maybe he felt that as a writer who is mostly unknown in Colombia, he had nothing to lose at this conference. His lack of preparation for his presentation made me wonder why he bothered turning up to speak at all.



Ian McEwan
16:00-16:40 Ian McEwan (sponsored by BBVA) is one of Britain’s best known contemporary writers, whose works have earned him numerous awards, including the Whitbread Novel Award, The Man Booker Prize, the WH Smith Literary Award, National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel. His most recent works include Enduring Love (1997), Amsterdam (1998), Atonement (2001) (which has also been converted into an Oscar-winning film starring Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy), Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007) and For You: A Libretto (2008).


Subtle

Although Ian McEwan, had humble beginnings (his father was a soldier and his mother was a chambermaid who left school at 14), his family revered education. The result of this was that at age 11 he was sent away to boarding school in England (his family being posted in Libya at that time, 1959). He talks about keeping a journal and how he regrets that his late adolescent self, embarrassed by the ramblings of his earlier self, decided to toss out all of the old journals. He regrets their disappearance because he realizes that these journals were the voice of his younger self, which he wishes he could recover. He advises would-be writers to keep a journal and in it record, "the ordinary details of daily life," because in retrospect these details are what make up life, told from the original perspective.

At university he began to try his hand a short stories. He strongly recommends the short story as a good medium for the aspiring writer, "because if it doesn't work out, you've only wasted two weeks of your life," (as opposed to five years). His early stories were dark and he says that they shocked his friends.

In response to the question about the experience of working on the script for Atonement, he notes that when you write a book you are the author of the vision, but in a film it is the director who take responsibility and credit for the vision. A breakdown in point of view led to McEwan being " sacked" as the screenwriter for Atonement. He did not appear to be unhappy with the film version of Atonement, although he noted that the ending of book is very different from the film version. Although the film is quite faithful to the original, at some points you need to have read the book in order to understand the subtleties of the exchanges between the characters. It is precisely this ability to be able to get inside the characters' heads that McEwan highlights as one of the advantages of novels.

His novella On Chesil Beach is currently being adapted for film. Although much of the story is told through flashbacks, it is the inner dialogue that reveals how each of the characters feels, simultaneously caring for the other while feeling disappointed and betrayed. It is a lovely, tightly written, high-strung little book, in which an instant of not being able to comprehend someone you truly care about changes the course of two lives in a way that is both completely perfectly mundane and at the same time tragic.

He a similar device in Amsterdam: characters misunderstand and take action as the result of these misunderstandings. In this case the best intentions lead to horrific outcomes. The book is dark and yet wonderfully funny.

The way that the young Briony misunderstands or misinterprets what she has witnessed is the key element in Atonement. Based on her (mis)understanding, actions ensue that are played through to their logical conclusion and cannot be undone.

Based on these three books, Amsterdam, Atonement, and On Chesil Beach, I asked Ian McEwan about this recurring theme in his books, of how a misunderstanding between two people can become a pivotal moment that leads to devastating consequences.

McEwan answered that he feels that coincidence or the random element is realistic because much of what happens in life is the result of mere chance or circumstance.

His answer did not respond to my intention, and it was ironic that he would fail to catch the meaning of a question about misunderstandings. I found his answer frustratingly off base. Replaying the exchange later in my head, I wondered if he had deliberately misunderstood as an illustration of how this takes place all the time. Perhaps he is more subtle than I gave him credit for at the moment.

In response to another question he added that the process of creating realism can entail diverging accounts of the same situation told from different perspectives. Human memory is fallible, and human desires can give rise to manipulations in interpretation.



Mike Reid
17:00-17:40 Mike Reid joined The Economist in 1990 as Mexico and Central America Correspondent and in 1994 changed to cover consumer industries. In 1996 he moved to Sao Paulo to be the Bureau Chief and in 1999 returned to London as Americas Editor. Prior to this, he was based in Lima, Peru working for The Economist, The Guardian and the BBC. His book Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America's Soul was published by Yale University Press in November 2007. Mike has been interviewed on the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 'PM', among others.

In Forgotten Continent, Michael Reid argues that rather than failing the test, Latin America’s efforts to build fairer and more prosperous societies make it one of the world’s most vigorous laboratories for capitalist democracy. In many countries—including Brazil, Chile and Mexico—democratic leaders are laying the foundations for faster economic growth and more inclusive politics, as well as tackling deep-rooted problems of poverty, inequality, and social injustice.

Drawing on his many years of reporting from inside Latin America’s cities, presidential palaces, and shantytowns, Michael provides a vivid, immediate, and informed account of a dynamic continent and its growing importance as a competitor in the global economy.

Reid's presentation at the afternoon session was a condensed version of his much more extensive analysis in The Forgotten Continent. Reid sees enormous potential in Latin America. The continent has faced the considerable challenges in trying to build democracies against a backdrop of social inequality. Despite the inherent difficulties, Reid feels that more progress has been made than is generally acknowledged by the outside world. It was interesting to hear this journalist's view on Colombia.

He highlights that the Colombian State has been under attack by illegal groups, and he emphasizes the need to build strong institutions. He is in favor of a free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States because increased investment in the legal economy would contribute to improving living conditions and human rights in Colombia. He considers that the United States should be involved in the war against drugs because of its drug use. Despite this justification, he feels that it was a big mistake for Colombia not to have informed its neighbors that it was planning on allowing US troops to use its military bases. The outcome of that failure in disclosure was that Colombia was weakened by losing friends and allies in the region. Overall he thinks that Alvaro Uribe has done a good job as president, although he feels that Uribe has fallen short in three areas: 1) healthcare, 2) transportation infrastructure, 3) and rectifying the "violent land reform" (by which the guerrillas and paramilitaries took over lands). He is opposed to seeing Uribe reelected for a third term in office, and he feels that it is time that other issues took precedence over security. In the regional context, Reid warns that it is a bad idea to appear as a strongman or a dictator. Along the same line, he feels that expropriation and nationalization are bad ideas for countries because governments are not good business managers.

I had a very nice chat with Mike's wife Emma at the embassy party on Saturday night. She has worked extensively with human rights and women's issues in Peru. Unlike Simon Schama, Emma was not drunk.




Wayuu Writers

Following the Meet the Authors sessions, I attended the conference on Wayuu writers, held at the Santo Domingo Monastery. The conference featured author Vicenta Siosi Pino, lawyer and author Estercilia Simancas and poet José Angel Guerra, facilitated by Wilder Guerra.

The authors talked about the influence of the Wayuu oral storytelling traditions in their writing, the Wayuu cosmo-vision, and the recurrence of symbolic elements such as the river, which is central in its importance for Wayuu survival in the dry lands of La Guajira.

Vicenta Siosi Pino and Estercilia Simancas have written about the culture clash between Colombian mainstream culture and the Wayuu traditions. Siosi has written about the experience of a Wayuu boy going to school in the city of Riohacha and how he is teased by his schoolmates until he finds a way to outsmart them.

In the story Manifiesto No Saber Firmer (I State That I Do Not Know How To Sign My Name) Simancas has written about the government's decision to register and issue identity cards to the Wayuu people, and the encounter between government officials and the Wayuu people. In the story Registrar's Office officials who does not understand Wayuu pronunciation transcribes Rafael as Raspahierro (Iron scraper), and assigns everyone 31 December as their birthday (as it is already a day for celebration) because they do not keep birth records in the same way. Photographing people for their ID cards is also a problem because the Wayuu feels that when their image is seen, it gets "worn out" or exhausts their essential self.

Siosi and Simancas also discussed the story of the Araña tejedora (The Weaving Spider) which addresses the rite of passage for young Wayuu women, in which they are shut in and isolated from the community for two to five months, receiving preparation and training from odler women in the community so that they will be marriageable.

José Angel Guerra talked about Wayuu poetry and the difficulty of translating Wayuu poetry into Spanish. The poetry is very brief, Haiku-style, and it hinges on doubles meanings and plays on words in the Wayuu language.

All of the authors agree that the fact that they are Wayuu is always present in their perspective and their writing.