I was not expecting to like this book, as I'd heard an adaption on the radio and it had annoyed me, but it was a present from my father so I started reading it. I have to say it won me over. It is about a scientist, Prof. Beard, who once won a Nobel prize for physics for pioneering work he did in his youth. Since then he has been trading on his fame and has become somewhat of a bureaucrat. Beard is a rather cynical person, a borderline sociopath with a chaotic love-life. He is appointed to be the figurehead of a renewable energy research centre where the fun begins. The book deals with society's response to climate change, a subject on which the only other fiction I have read is Michael Crichton's Climate of Fear, but Solar is a very different kind of book. It actually reminded me of an academic comedy, like Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man or several of David Lodge's books. To me, the most amusing bits were when Beard has to interact with social scientists.
Ian McEwan has obviously boned up on physics, climate change and renewable energy, so much so that the book borders on science fiction. The device at the centre of the story is a McGuffin. It did not sound like it would be particularly efficient or the answer to the world's energy problems to me, but that hardly matters. The deficiencies of urban wind turbines was true enough though.
McEwan is author who can write about technology. I read another of his books, The Innocent, which was about an telecommunications engineer sent to set up spying equipment in Berlin. I suppose McEwan's most famous book is Atonement.
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