Life That Ran Away
A tragic-comic journey with a Nobel-prize winning physicist embarked on saving the world, and by extension, his life.
Solar
Ian McEwan
London: Vintage Books, 2022, 317 pages, 12.95 euros
It is rare that a book related to science makes you laugh out loud, but Ian McEwan makes you chuckle and smile at the repeated gaffes of his anti-hero, a renowned scientist in free fall. Here we are on a visit to Longyearbyen in Svalbard, Norway, where our protagonist invites us to visit the field work of other scientists working on the effects of global warming on the cryosphere. The account of the snowmobile trip across the ice, the pit-stop to urinate in the sub-zero blizzard conditions, getting his little member stuck on the zipper only to unstick it with his flask of whiskey, the near-death experience with the hungry polar bear, these are incredibly witty and amusing moments. (pp. 54-89)
(It’s worth mentioning that ‘it’s illegal to die in Longyearbyen’ in the sense that in this small 2,000-person town, you have to go somewhere else to die because you no longer can be buried there. This is due to the corpses that were buried there during the Spanish influenza in the early 1900s that may still contain the virus: the corpses have frozen in the permafrost and with global warming when the permafrost thaws it will release methane (30 times more potent than carbon dioxide) but the risk is that the corpses will also thaw and release their incubated Spanish influenza virus. So no more new dead in Longyearbyen, just so you know.)
This is not climate science fiction or a rant about path dependency. This is an amusing encounter with the fictional Michael Beard – a Nobel laureate in Physics – and his awkward attempts to keep his life on track after the glory of his Beard-Einstein Conflation theory. Ian McEwan brilliantly develops Beard into this overweight, arrogant, indifferent, selfish character that represents, in many ways, the broader concept of humanity he is supposedly trying to save from itself. But Beard cannot get his act together, falling in and out of marriages, over-indulging in alcohol, incapable of addressing his shortcomings, not being able to see the bigger picture, caught in his routines and bad habits, going from one keynote speech to another, he is lost and rudderless, so he latches on to a concept his PhD student is pursuing:
“I’m talking of artificial photosynthesis, of copying the methods nature took three billion years to perfect. We’ll use light directly to make cheap hydrogen and oxygen out of water, and run our turbines night and day, or we’ll make fuels out of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide, or we’ll build desalination plants that make electricity as well as fresh water.” (p.172)
Beard basically steals the PhD student thesis about artificial photosynthesis and runs with it as far it can take him, giving speeches, fund raising, building research centres, writing papers, and generally keeping a semblance of normality and composure behind the amusing turmoil of his meandering mind. It’s hard to empathise with Beard because he single-handedly causes the damage in his personal life, much like humanity at large and anthropogenic impacts on the planet, and you feel encouraged by his artificial photosynthesis pursuits. Still, it’s not really his passion or his idea, much like our attempts to recycle or go electric. His life just keeps on unravelling, much like the incremental climate-related episodes of flash flooding, forest fires, sporadic tsunamis, heat waves, and rising temperatures, similar to Beard’s growing paunch and double-chin going deep in his 60s.
In many ways Beard is a despicable person, but he is also genuinely human, and this makes us relate and want to see him succeed, just like the many women in his life do, just like his daughter Catriona (precocious 3-year old) sees him as a saviour because: “She understood that his job was to save the world, and since the world was her mother, Primrose Hill, the dance shop and her playgroup, she was fiercely proud.” (p.246) This short sentence is poignant and makes us all proud of Beard for trying, not very elegantly perhaps in its implementation, but a good effort, Michael. What does your world look like?
