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Synopsis
Universally acclaimed as one of the world's greatest novelists, Ian McEwan is a Booker Prize-winning, best-selling literary master. He displays a fresh facet of his considerable talent in Solar, a satirical novel rife with blistering humor. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is fast approaching 60, a mere shell of the academic titan he once was. While his fifth marriage falls apart, Michael suddenly finds himself with an unexpected opportunity to reinvigorate his career and possibly save humankind from the growing threat of global warming.
The Barnes & Noble Review
"He belonged to that class of men -- vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever -- who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women." This first sentence of Ian McEwan's new novel describes Michael Beard, age 53, a British Nobel-winning physicist and television celebrity. Unfortunately for Beard, the fifth of those women to marry him is openly sleeping with the couple's building contractor, Rodney Tarpin. Although Beard has cheated on Patrice, he now wants her back and decides to make her jealous by pretending that he has a female visitor while Patrice is in her bedroom. He finds a woman's voice on the radio, turns it up, and intercuts it with his voice. After a few minutes, "He went into the bathroom, ran a tap, flushed the lavatory and laughed out loud. Then he gave out a muted whoop. Patrice should know he was having fun." With this not so "clever" scheme and more to follow, Beard joins a distinguished line of bumbling cuckolds -- Joyce's Bloom, Nabokov's Humbert, Bellow's Herzog -- in McEwan's first go at a comic novel.