Michael Beard won a Nobel prize fairly early on in his career, and has drifted through life trading on his success without achieving much else. His private life is a bit of a mess, with four failed marriages behind him, and the fifth falling apart. Working at a facility researching alternative energy sources, a keen young scientist tries to persuade him of the potential of solar power to solve the problems of global warming and peak oil.

I was a bit hesitant about reading this because I had it in mind that the book would be a bit more worthy than entertaining, but in fact it was a really good read. It mostly reminded me of David Lodge, partly because of the middle-aged male protagonist (cf. Vic Wilcox, Tubby Passmore), and partly because of the way the book was had involved the author investigating a particular field (cf. neuroscience, philosophy) and then weaving a story around it. And like Lodge, it was also pretty funny.

Beard was particularly believable, as someone who is at the same time very experienced in his own subject field, able to cruise through presentations he gives at conferences, but hopelessly disorganised in his private life. There's a good description towards the end of the book of his realisation that while he had always had the expectation that, one day, he'd be in control and have his life organised and running smoothly, in fact that's never going to happen.

I also was impressed by the way that McEwan was able to describe Beard's opinion of the arts as compared to science: while studying as an undergraduate, Beard takes a fancy to an English student, and mugs up on Milton for a couple of weeks in order to be able to impress her. He is struck by how he finds it relatively easy to learn enough to discuss things in a way convincing enough to win the girl, and how it's impossible to conceive of an arts student learning sufficient theoretical physics to perform the trick in reverse.

When Beard has an argument with a strident feminist about the reasons why there's an imbalance between men and women in science, you can sense and identify with his frustration at being able deploy his scientific arguments against what he sees as the woolly-ness of her sociological ones. And as you're reading, you can sympathise with both sides of the argument, so it's not as if McEwan is poking fun at one of them (or perhaps he's trying to show that they're both equally bigoted and ridiculous).

I don't think this was quite as good a novel as some of the more serious ones he's done, and it wasn't as good as Saturday, but it was a pretty good read.

Re-read in 2019

Listened to the audiobook this time.

Episode where he has to put on multiple layers of clothing to go on a 100km snowmobile journey and then wants to go to the toilet etc is pretty funny. And when he fakes the murder of his wife’s lover, by her other lover. then goes somewhere to establish an alibi and prepares himself for interviews by trying to enumerate the things he must appear to be ignorant of, and worries he’s forgotten one of them.

When the book talks about the research being done and developments that will help provide a clean energy source, I find myself thinking ”at last - some good news - what a relief” before realising that it’s only a story.

Funny the way he says something moderately inoffensive at a conference about women in science and this blows up into him being a Neo-eugencist. A protestor throws tomato at him and he throws it back and she dramatically collapses and photographer is there to see him being handcuffed. All the while he’s sort of bemusedly caught up in something which has a sort of logic to it but is not what he planned or intended at all.

His memory of his first wife, who was an English student at Oxford while he was studying physics. He spent a week reading Milton in order to have something to talk about with her, and it worked. He reflects how easy it is to bluff his way into the arts world and how it would simply not be possible for an arts student to do the reverse, therefore science, with his full timetable of lectures and effort to understand things (he compares understanding the equations to lifting weights: you simply can't do it at first but after lots of work you can start to manage it) with the literature students, who lay in bed until noon and then have the odd tutorial, to conclude that their subject is simply not as difficult as his. (In the interview at end of the audiobook, McEwan says he thinks his time doing an English MA was ridiculously easy compared to what science graduates do and he has found himself thinking perhaps are degrees are a fraud.)

“A welling sense of victimhood” when can’t find hotel room and is wandering round corridors looking

Friend concerned that global warming might not be happening and the business will fail. Tells him not to believe what a small minority of rogue scientists are saying. “Cheer up, it’s a catastrophe”.

Surprised by end of book because I thought there was another 40 mins to go. But Audiobook has interview with McEwan. I can't remember that being in the paperback. McEwan says part of the novels genesis was in his own trip to arctic where artists and scientists were looking at global warming and he noticed what a mess there accommodation became - this was a key episode in the book.

Completed : 30-Jul-2011

Completed : 25-Sep-2019 (audiobook)