Solar (2010) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

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• Michael Beard: A Nobel prize-winning 53-year-old physicist heading a government-backed initiative tackling global warming.
• Tom Aldous: Employee of the Energy initiative center.
• Patrice: Michael's soon-to-be ex-wife, who is having an affair with Rodney Tarpin. Petit, blond, bears a slight resemblance to Marlyn Monroe.
• Darlene: Michael Beard's lover in the U.S.
• Rodney Tarpin: A builder, who is having an affair with Patrice.
• Jock Braby: The Center's administrator
• Catriona: Add a description of this character.
• Toby Hammer: Beard's business partner in the U.S
• Maisie: Michael Beard's first wife and college sweetheart. Studied the work of John Milton at Oxford.
• Mr Barnard: Lawyer representing the Centre for Renewable Energy.
• Barnard
• Unis
• Terry: Fictional lover of Melissa
• Barry Pickett
• Melissa: Michael Beard's lover.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Beard was surprised to find how complicated it was to be the cuckold. Misery was not simple. Let no one say that this late in life he was immune to fresh experience.”

• “No woman had ever looked or sounded so desirable as the wife he suddenly could not have.”

• “Physics was free of human taint; it described a world that would still exist if men and women and all their sorrows did not. In this conviction he was at one with Albert Einstein.”

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• This was what he disliked about political people—injustice and calamity animated them, it was their milk, their lifeblood, it pleasured them.

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• There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over the centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world and therefore made more sense, or was just a little less irrelevant.

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• He knew it too well, the special kind of mental suffocation that came from contact with aggressive low intelligence.

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• Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigor defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here the mystically inclined could find whatever they required and claim science as their proof.

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• How were they to save the earth—assuming it needed saving, which he doubted—when it was so much larger than the boot room?

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• The essence of a crank was, first, to believe that all the world’s problems could be reduced to one and be solved. And second, to go on about it nonstop.

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• Human imperfection was a large subject. Consider just a few of the defects. S-shaped backs that easily buckled, breathing and swallowing recklessly sharing a passage, the infectious proximity of sex and excretion, childbirth pure agony, testicles unwieldy and vulnerable, weak eyesight a general affliction, an immune system that could devour its owner. And that was just the body. Among all the yearning rationales for the godhead, the argument from design collapsed with Homo sapiens. No god worth his salt could be so careless at the workbench.

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• monothematic, stricken. His fifth marriage was disintegrating, and he should have known how to behave, how to take the long view, how to take the blame. Weren’t marriages, his marriages, tidal, with one rolling out just before another rolled in? But this one was different. He did not know how to behave, long views pained him, and for once there was no blame for him to assume, as he saw it. It was his wife who was having the affair, and having it flagrantly, punitively,

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• He belonged to that class of men—vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever—who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue. But the Michael Beard of this time was a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic,

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• douleur redoubled, because he knew she knew he was watching. Then her absence hung in the summer dusk like garden bonfire smoke, an erotic charge of invisible particulates that caused him to remain in position for many pointless minutes.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• London, England
• New Mexico
• Lordsburg
• Heathrow
• Longyearbyen
• Berlin
• Belsize Park
• Cambridge
• Norfolk
• Dallas
• Paddington
• Paris
• Cricklewood

First Sentence edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Environmentalism: The book is actually about truth versus lies in all endeavors lending themselves to authoritative pronouncements, and there has been no greater recent authority in Western civilization than the church of the scientists.
• Anti-hero: Describe this theme.

Series & Lists edit see section history

List the series to which this book belongs.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Ian McEwan (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (2010)
• Nobbie Award (2010)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 823.914

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( M ) › McEwan, Ian
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Solar Website: The author's official website for the book.
• Wikipedia

More Books Like This edit see section history