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    Solar
    Solar
    Solar
    Ebook371 pages6 hours

    Solar

    By Ian McEwan

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement, this “totally gripping and entirely hilarious” novel (The Wall Street Journal) traces the arc of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s ambitions and self-deception.

    Dr. Michael Beard’s best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions, and halfheartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. Meanwhile, Michael’s fifth marriage is floundering due to his incessant womanizing. When his professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Michael to extricate himself from his marital problems, reinvigorate his career, and save the world from environmental disaster. But can a man who has made a mess of his life clean up the messes of humanity?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateMar 30, 2010
    ISBN9780385533423
    Author

    Ian McEwan

    Ian McEwan (Aldershot, Reino Unido, 1948) se licenció en Literatura Inglesa en la Universidad de Sussex y es uno de los miembros más destacados de su muy brillante generación. En Anagrama se han publicado sus dos libros de relatos, Primer amor, últimos ritos (Premio Somerset Maugham) y Entre las sábanas, las novelas El placer del viajero, Niños en el tiempo (Premio Whitbread y Premio Fémina), El inocente, Los perros negros, Amor perdurable, Amsterdam (Premio Booker), Expiación (que ha obtenido, entre otros premios, el WH Smith Literary Award, el People’s Booker y el Commonwealth Eurasia), Sábado (Premio James Tait Black), En las nubes, Chesil Beach (National Book Award), Solar (Premio Wodehouse), Operación Dulce, La ley del menor, Cáscara de nuez, Máquinas como yo, La cucaracha y Lecciones y el breve ensayo El espacio de la imaginación. McEwan ha sido galardonado con el Premio Shakespeare. Foto © Maria Teresa Slanzi.

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    Reviews for Solar

    3.5/5

    1,071 ratings69 reviews

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    • 4/5
      While I have enjoyed many of his books, I have never thought of Ian McEwan as a particularly humorous writer. One of my favourites among his novels is Sweet Tooth, which shows him in relatively light-hearted mode, but even it does not leave the reader convulsed with laughter. I was, therefore, surprised that this novel should have won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature.

      I remember reading it shortly after it was published (and, indeed before it was warded that prize) and enjoying it. At that time, I was working on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Team at the Department for Education, and Michael Beard, the rather unpleasant protagonist, struck me as uncomfortably reminiscent of some of the external stakeholders in the science world with whom my colleagues and I had regularly to interact. Re-reading it now, a long way removed from the world of academic scientists, I found it heavier going.

      There are some very humorous moments, but it is not by any customary definition a comic novel. Michael Beard, a Nobel Laureate, is also a decidedly unempathetic character. Having been married four times when the novel opens, he finds himself in the unaccustomed position of being the cuckold, as is beautiful and much younger wife has taken up with a builder who had been working on their house. Thitherto, marital infidelity had been Beard’s own speciality, and he does not like having the tables turned. That particular bump in the marital road is resolved in unusual circumstances, and Beard moves on.

      McEwan’s observation of the gradual unravelling of Beard’s self-confidence is acute, and the hoops he goes through to try to retain his prominence within the academic science community (always terrified that the discoveries that had secured his meteoric early success might come to be challenged in the light of subsequent discoveries) and secure his financial future are very capably drawn. Somehow, though, the novel struggled to hold my attention this time around. While still a good book, it has not, in my view, aged well, and is not on a par with McEwan at his imperious best.
    • 3/5
      his book was named by the science fiction web site I09.com as one of the best science fiction books of 2010. It is a good book but it is not science fiction. It's the story of a physicist, who made a name for himself early in his career but has not had an original thought since. He manages to parley that original success into a long career but he is a fraud and he knows it.
    • 4/5
      Another finely tuned study from a true master of the form. McEwan has unbelievable command, sentence to sentence, chapter to chapter which he uses here to flesh out the moment to moment emotional tone of a despicable aging physicist. The real trick is turning a monster into a man, making everyone uncomfortable in the process. I still don't understand why McEwan always puts in something shocking and unlikely in the story. Worth it for the Unintentional Thief story and as serendipitous parring with Banville's The Infinities.
    • 3/5
      I understand, dear Ian. Dr. Beard is deplorable. He is also us: humans, particularly Americans. Imprisoned by his own appetites, he harbors only scenarios for being diversely sated. He's always selfish. He says what people want to here. Such a cad, he knows he needs to stop but can't.

      It was appreciated that novel continued along its arc. After the resolution of the mud room in the polar expedition, I feared that Michael would discover self correction. Thank you, dear author.
    • 3/5
      Couldn't finish this one - TOOOOO depressing! Although the writing is good, I could not get 'into' the story line enough to stick with it. :-(
    • 4/5
      Strangley involving tale of the motivations and internal machinations of an extremely selfish scientist. Very convincing psychological portrait.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written as always. Real toad of a main character at whom you have to laugh or just despise. Chewy bits of science: Beard-Einstein conflation, artificial photosynthesis. You can't help but turn thoughtful about climate change. I still can't believe he got away with using the real Nobel Laureate's name in a work of fiction.
    • 3/5
      I disliked this book and I think the reason why is that I disliked the main character. There are many main characters that the reader is meant to dislike and it makes for great interest in the book but this character I didn't care what happened to him.
    • 4/5
      Ah, McEwan. I just love this writer. Every book is so different that you start them in perfect anticipation of what he'll throw at you this time.

      Solar was a great read, possibly one of the funniest of McEwan's that I've read so far. The protagonist is scientist Professor Beard, Nobel Prize Winner, womaniser, egotist and general all round self-indulgent pig. He's a great character - super smart and super dumb in equal measures, a loathsome sloth of a man who rides his professional and personal life largely on the back of his Nobel win. Oftentimes he reminded me of an academic version of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, another brilliantly flawed character who is one of my all-time favourites.

      I always find it very difficult to review a McEwan book as I never want to give too much of the plot away. It's suffice to say that in Solar Beard's professional and personal lives collide in some very unexpected ways which are in turn toe-curlingly embarrassing, laugh out loud funny and page turningly brilliant. A great mix of comedy and tension, and thoroughly enjoyable read.
    • 4/5
      Quite a fun read with vivid scenes here and there, mainly those of the anti-hero's private life.And some anti-hero: he's fat and selfish and obsessively unfaithful to his women, most of who're rather improbably warm decent types. The science side rather lacks credibility, at least for me as a non-scientist. The fundamental idea of a new power source that somehow combines Einstein's work on light with the deep working of photosynthesis is neat enough as a science-fiction idea. But there seems to be a confusion about what is theoretical science and what is engineering. It's highly improbable that a lazy, burnt out theoretical physicist would hold 17 patents in an industrial process, even if he stole them from somebody else.It's made fairly clear that he doesn't really understand the engineering. A workable revolutionary technical process is unlikely to come from a single (dead) man's notebooks. There seems to be no testing of prototypes; an airforce flypast is on hand for the first switch on which will transform everything! and even more improbable: an American venture on a huge scale doesn't have money to spare for lawyers to fight a challenge from the Brits. All this makes it come across as a bit lightweight.
    • 3/5
      Excellent writer he is, McEwan managed to make the main character so sickly appalling and repulsive and, yes, believable, that I had to put the book down so many times. I also picked it up because of his good writing, but, oh, it was a difficult read.
    • 3/5
      Meh. McEwan can do better.
    • 2/5
      disappointing. annoying character and little point.
    • 4/5
      His use of english is outstanding!!! So far his other books are as good. WOW!
    • 5/5
      I was taken aback by the humour in this - you can pretty much rely on Ian McEwan to deliver something satisfyingly literary with the odd titter, but this - at least the first part of it - was full-on hilarious. Reading it in a public place, I was in danger of choking on suppressed laughter. There was a lot of quite dense physics stuff too, but when you add in the slapstick and calculate the arithmetical mean it ends up bang on the funny bone.

      You could at a pinch read the first section as a stand-alone story, and not bother with the rest - anyone finding the physics bits heavy going might be well advised to do that. The second and third sections are denser, heavier on the physics, and less funny. If you are Ian McEwan you can get away with things other people can't - like including long speeches word for word, and including plot events which appear to have been lifted wholesale from Jeffrey Archer (Jeffrey Archer!!) and which weren't even original when Jeffrey used them. Then, after letting your public think the less of you for several pages, admitting via a character that you did lift them from Archer and they weren't original when he used them etc etc. Either brave, daft, or meaningful in ways I can't discern. Either way, I'm glad I ploughed through to the end. You always come out of his novels with more knowledge than you started, and this one had a playfulness about it that made it probably my favourite by him so far.
    • 2/5
      I like Ian McEwan but could not finish this book - trying too hard to be Malcolm Bradbury, another author I struggle with.
    • 2/5
      Summary: In the afterglow of winning a Nobel Prize, Michael Beard lives a dismal life marked by multiple marriages, figurehead positions, and his own gluttony. However, after his most recent wife leaves him, Beard attempts to start living life to the fullest. He stumbles into this new life with a great deal of fanfare and catastrophe: covering up murder, nearly losing his penis to frostbite, and devising a plan to harness the power of the sun to save the planet.
    • 4/5
      My brain couldn't quite keep up with the physics but oh dear me the story of Michael Beard----what a character to behold!! There are a few incredible laugh out loud pieces---almost place holders in Beard's life and then you reach the moment when everything sort of comes to pass and there is Beard---seeing everything come at him at once. Can you like Beard and/or sympathize in any way with his character? He is such a beautifully crafted character---and listening to him speak, in the audio by Roger Allam, is truly wonderful.
    • 2/5
      Darkly satirical in a way that worked, for me, in Amsterdam but flounders in the format of this much longer work. I don't need a sympathetic main character but I won't deny some glimmer of humanity can help. Such a thorough ass really requires an impeccably well-written story to maintain my interest, and this ain't one. There are a few amusing set-pieces and some interesting observations on the state of the planet and its inhabitants but they are lost in endless pages of sadly rather boring writing.
    • 3/5
      Ian McEwan's "Solar" reads much better as a study in the micro echoing the macro than for the story itself. The writing struggles to be humorous, but ends up feeling more pathetic, tragic, and ultimately embarrassing in many sections.

      The redemption for this novel is the postscript at the end, which is the text of the Nobel Committee's speech given when the protagonist won his Nobel Prize (long before the action of the book). The prize was for a discovery of the way that tightly bound matter can be unraveled under the right conditions. And that's just what happens to the protagonist. His whole life is spent tying himself in knots, until all the loose ends threaten to tie him down at the end of the story. Somehow, a loose thread is pulled and his concerns (and his life) come undone.

      I also enjoyed how the protagonist enumerated all the problems with getting the world to convert to an alternative energy source, and then proceeded to exemplify those problems in his personal life. Greed, selfishness, impatience, indifference, belief in one answer to solve all the problems. These were all traits of his personal life and his relationships. He tried to overcome these traits in others to introduction easy cheap energy to the world, but ultimately failed due, I believe, to his inability to overcome them himself.

      I wouldn't recommend this to someone who hasn't read McEwan before. This is far from his best. Stick with "Atonement" or "Saturday" before tackling this non-story with a message.
    • 3/5
      A very interesting work with twists that I wasn't expecting. However, there were no characters in the book that I actually liked. All were rather repulsive.
    • 2/5
      I am loathe to comment on this novel, which centers on a complex but ultimately immoral character. I could not find much sympathy for the protagonist, nor for many of the other people in the story. McEwan's talent carried me along through the story but I found it ultimately not very satisfying as Beard is such a repellent human being. I also wondered about the value of such a character study, since character study this book is--McEwan portrays Beard as a smart fellow with no redeeming qualities, and what's the point of that? There may be such people in the world but this novel did not help me understand them or how I should respond if I encounter someone like Beard.
    • 4/5
      This gave me everything I could have asked for from a new Ian McEwan, a topical subject,[ global-warming:] and a totally human, messy character making a mess of his life as we make a mess of the planet.
      My criticisms, if any, are very small ones.
      If one thinks of a random number to put in a story the usual choice will be 23, and this happens several times.
    • 4/5
      The protagonist of Solar, Michael Beard, is an amoral character and a brilliant scientist past his heyday. Beard lurches from one disaster to the next and an event at the start of the story eventually catches up with him at the end. Along the way his womanising, gluttony and dishonesty seemingly know no bounds. Can't say that this was a particular humorous book but then again this depends on your sense of humour. Worth reading but McEwan has written sharper books than this.
    • 1/5
      Worst book I've read for a long time. No character development. Sketchy plot. Wooden writing. Boring as hell because it repeats itself in so many places.

      I can't believe I read the same book as some of the reviewers here who have gone before me. There is only one funny part: when Beard's penis freezes to his zipper in the Arctic. I failed to find humour elsewhere.

      Can't believe this is by the same author who wrote Atonement. Mind you, I didn't like Chesil Beach either.
    • 4/5
      Extremely well written with characters and situations that will stay with me for a long time. Not sure it was as hilarious as it was said to be, but then it is Ian McEwan. The ending was inevitable but welcome, all the same - the only way out and something of a relief, in a strange way! The author was particularly clever to make his loathsome central character occasionally sympathetic, just enough to keep you going to see what he would do next.
    • 4/5
      Das Buch um den alternden Nobelpreisträger Michael Beard, den eigentlich nichts mehr interessiert, ist interessant und witzig. Es hat einige unerwartete Wendungen (z.B. die ganze Geschichte um seinen Assistenten Aldous) und sehr gut beobachtete und ausgarbeitete Seqeuenzen (z.B. die Szene mit der sozialkonstruktivistischen Wissenschaftlerin, aufgrund derer Beard zum "Nazi-Professor" wird). Insgesamt taugt es wahrscheinlich auch irgendwie als Parabel über den modernen Menschen und die moderne Wissenschaft.
      Es wirkt zum Teil etwas additiv, aber da sich am Ende alles fügt, passt das dann auch wieder.
      Das Buch macht Spaß zu lesen, ist meiner Meinung nach aber trotz der aktuellen Thematik, des bekannten Autors und der gelungenen Szenen insgesamt etwas belanglos.
    • 2/5
      Rating: two grudging stars of five (p81)

      In the middle of a paragraph, a thunderbolt struck me: I don't like Ian MxEwan. I didn't like Atonement...I thought the damned kid shoulda been stoned...I didn't like Saturday...and I do NOT like this tedious tale of a credit-grabbing bore of a has-been.

      So that's that. Like David Lodge, I shall leave the McEwanizing to the Brits and their fellow travelers. I myownself will be hornswoggled if I EVER consent to open another of his books.
    • 3/5
      So many people have already reviewed this book, so let me add just a couple of comments:

      --The book started strong. I got right into the story and enjoyed the first bit of it. After that, it (or I) waxed and waned. I simply did not care much what happened to Michael Beard.

      --I did, though, like the writing. The contrast between Michael's mild reaction to his wife's affair with Rodney and his rage over someone stealing his crisps was masterful.

      I think the question raised in an earlier review as to whether one can like a book without liking the main character is interesting. And I think the answer is yes; but for me, I have to be interested in the character and, as I said, I really wasn't much interested in Mr. Beard.

      This is my third Ian McEwan book. Hated Amsterdam. One of my least favourite reads ever. Liked Atonement quite a bit. I have Saturday on my TBR shelves......
    • 2/5
      What an idiot character - could not be bothered with him

    Book preview

    Solar - Ian McEwan

    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, 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, certainly without remorse. He was discovering in himself, among an array of emotions, intense moments of shame and longing. Patrice was seeing a builder, their builder, the one who had repointed their house, fitted their kitchen, retiled their bathroom, the very same heavyset fellow who in a tea break had once shown Michael a photo of his mock-Tudor house, renovated and tudorized by his own hand, with a boat on a trailer under a Victorian-style lamppost on the concreted front driveway, and space on which to erect a decommissioned red phone box. 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.

    He had it coming. His four previous wives, Maisie, Ruth, Eleanor, Karen, who all still took a distant interest in his life, would have been exultant, and he hoped they would not be told. None of his marriages had lasted more than six years, and it was an achievement of sorts to have remained childless. His wives had discovered early on what a poor or frightening prospect of a father he presented, and they had protected themselves and got out. He liked to think that if he had caused unhappiness, it was never for long, and it counted for something that he was still on speaking terms with all his exes.

    But not with his current wife. In better times, he might have predicted for himself a manly embrace of double standards, with bouts of dangerous fury, perhaps an episode of drunken roaring in the back garden late at night, or writing off her car, and the calculated pursuit of a younger woman, a Samson-like toppling of the marital temple. Instead he was paralyzed by shame, by the extent of his humiliation. Even worse, he amazed himself with his inconvenient longing for her. These days, desire for Patrice came on him out of nowhere, like an attack of stomach cramp. He would have to sit somewhere alone and wait for it to pass. Apparently there was a certain kind of husband who thrilled at the notion of his wife with other men. Such a man might arrange to have himself bound and gagged and locked in the bedroom wardrobe while ten feet away his better half went at it. Had Beard at last located within himself a capacity for sexual masochism? No woman had ever looked or sounded so desirable as the wife he suddenly could not have. Conspicuously, he went to Lisbon to look up an old friend, but it was a joyless three nights. He had to have his wife back, and dared not drive her away with shouting or threats or brilliant moments of unreason. Nor was it in his nature to plead. He was frozen, he was abject, he could think of nothing else. The first time she left him a note—Staying over at R’s tonight. xx P—did he go round to the mock-Tudor ex-council semi with the shrouded speedboat on the hard standing and a hot tub in the pint-sized backyard to mash the man’s brains with his own monkey wrench? No, he watched television for five hours in his overcoat, drank two bottles of wine, and tried not to think. And failed.

    But thinking was all he had. When his other wives had found out about his affairs, they had raged, coldly or tearfully, they had insisted on long sessions into the early hours to deliver their thoughts on broken trust, and eventually their demands for a separation and all that followed. But when Patrice happened across some e-mails from Suzanne Reuben, a mathematician at the Humboldt University in Berlin, she became unnaturally elated. That same afternoon she moved her clothes into the guest bedroom. It was a shock when he slid the wardrobe doors open to confirm the fact. Those rows of silk and cotton dresses, he realized now, had been a luxury and a comfort, versions of herself lining up to please him. No longer. Even the hangers were gone. She smiled through dinner that night as she explained that she too intended to be free, and within the week she had started her affair. What was a man to do? He apologized one breakfast, told her his lapse meant nothing, made grand promises he sincerely believed he might keep. This was the closest he came to pleading. She said she did not mind what he did. This was what she was doing—and this was when she revealed the identity of her lover, the builder with the sinister name of Rodney Tarpin, seven inches taller and twenty years younger than the cuckold, whose sole reading, according to his boast, back when he was humbly grouting and beveling for the Beards, was the sports section of a tabloid newspaper.

    An early sign of Beard’s distress was dysmorphia, or perhaps it was dysmorphia he was suddenly cured of. At last he knew himself for what he was. Catching sight of a conical pink mess in the misted full-length mirror as he came out of the shower, he wiped down the glass, stood full on, and took a disbelieving look. What engines of self-persuasion had let him think for so many years that looking like this was seductive? That foolish thatch of earlobe-level hair that buttressed his baldness, the new curtain swag of fat that hung below his armpits, the innocent stupidity of swelling in gut and rear. Once he had been able to improve on his mirror self by pinning back his shoulders, standing erect, tightening his abs. Now human blubber draped his efforts. How could he possibly keep hold of a young woman as beautiful as she was? Had he honestly thought that status was enough, that his Nobel Prize would keep her in his bed? Naked, he was a disgrace, an idiot, a weakling. Even eight consecutive push-ups were beyond him. Whereas Tarpin could run up the stairs to the Beards’ master bedroom holding under one arm a fifty-kilo cement sack. Fifty kilos? That was roughly Patrice’s weight.

    She kept him at a distance with lethal cheerfulness. These were additional insults, her singsong hellos, the matinal recital of domestic detail, and her evening whereabouts, and none of it would have mattered if he had been able to despise her a little and plan to be shot of her. Then they could have settled down to the brief, grisly dismantling of a five-year childless marriage. Of course she was punishing him, but when he suggested that, she shrugged and said that she could just as easily have said the same of him. She had merely been waiting for this opportunity, he said, and she laughed and said that in that case she was grateful to him.

    In his delusional state, he was convinced that just as he was about to lose her, he had found the perfect wife. That summer of 2000 she was wearing different clothes, she had a different look around the house—faded tight jeans, flip-flops, a ragged pink cardigan over a T-shirt, her blond hair cut short, her pale eyes a deeper agitated blue. Her build was slight, and now she looked like a teenager. From the empty rope-handled glossy carrier bags and tissue paper left strewn on the kitchen table for his inspection, he gathered she was buying herself new underwear for Tarpin to remove. She was thirty-four, and still kept the strawberries-and-cream look of her twenties. She did not tease or taunt or flirt with him—that at least would have been communication of a sort—but steadily perfected the bright indifference with which she intended to obliterate him.

    He needed to cease needing her, but desire was not like that. He wanted to want her. One sultry night he lay uncovered on the bed and tried masturbating himself toward freedom. It bothered him that he could not see his genitalia unless his head was propped up on two pillows, and his fantasy was continually interrupted by Tarpin, who, like some ignorant stagehand with ladder and bucket, kept wandering onto the set. Was there another man on the planet apart from Beard attempting at this moment to pleasure himself with thoughts of his own wife just thirty feet away across the landing? The question emptied him of purpose. And it was too hot.

    Friends used to tell him that Patrice resembled Marilyn Monroe, at least from certain angles and in a certain light. He had been happy to accept this status-enhancing comparison, but he never really saw it. Now he did. She had changed. There was a new fullness in her lower lip, a promise of trouble when she lowered her gaze, and her shortened hair lay curled on her nape in a compelling, old-fashioned way. Surely she was more beautiful than Monroe, drifting about the house and garden at weekends in a haze of blond and pink and pale blue. What an adolescent color scheme he had fallen for, and at his age.

    He turned fifty-three that July, and naturally she ignored his birthday, then pretended in her jolly new style to remember it three days later. She gave him a kipper tie in Day-Glo mint green, telling him the style was being revived. Yes, the weekends were the worst. She would come into a room where he was, not wishing to talk, but perhaps wanting to be seen, and she would look about in mild surprise before wandering off. She was evaluating everything afresh, not only him. He would see her at the bottom of the garden under the horse chestnut, lying on the grass with the newspapers, waiting in deep shade for her evening to begin. Then she would retire to the guest room to shower, dress, apply makeup and scent. As if reading his thoughts, she was wearing her lipstick red and thick. Perhaps Rodney Tarpin was encouraging the Monroe notion—a cliché Beard was now obliged to share.

    If he was still in the house when she left (he tried so hard to keep busy at night), he found it irresistible to ameliorate his longing and pain by observing her from an upstairs window as she stepped into the evening air of Belsize Park and walked up the garden path—how disloyal of the unoiled garden gate to squeak in the same old way—and climbed into her car, a small and flighty black Peugeot of wanton acceleration. She was so eager, gunning the engine as she pulled away from the curb, that his 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. He was not actually mad, he kept telling himself, but he thought he was getting a taste, a bitter sip.

    What impressed him was his ability to think of nothing else. When he was reading a book, when he was giving a talk, he was really thinking of her, or of her and Tarpin. It was a bad idea to be at home when she was out seeing him, but since Lisbon he had no desire to look up old girlfriends. Instead he took on a series of evening lectures about quantum field theory at the Royal Geographical Society, joined radio and TV discussions, and at occasional events filled in for colleagues who were ill. Let the philosophers of science delude themselves to the contrary, 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.

    But even if he ate late with friends, he was usually home before her, and was forced to wait, whether he wanted to or not, until she returned, though nothing would happen when she did. She would go straight to her room, and he would remain in his, not wanting to meet her on the stairs in her state of postcoital somnolence. It was almost better when she stayed over at Tarpin’s. Almost, but it would cost him a night’s sleep.

    At two a.m. one night in late July he was in his dressing gown on his bed listening to the radio when he heard her come in and immediately, without premeditation, enacted a scheme to make her jealous and unsure and want to come back to him. On the BBC World Service a woman was discussing village customs as they affected domestic life among Turkish Kurds, a soothing drone of cruelty, injustice, and absurdity. Turning the volume down but keeping his fingers on the knob, Beard loudly intoned a fragment of a nursery rhyme. He figured that from her room she would hear his voice but not his words. As he finished his sentence, he turned up the volume of the woman’s voice for a few seconds, which he then interrupted with a line from the lecture he had given that night, and made the woman reply at greater length. He kept this going for five minutes, his voice, then the woman’s, sometimes artfully overlapping the two. The house was silent—listening, of course. He went into the bathroom, ran a tap, flushed the lavatory, and laughed out loud. Patrice should know that his lover was a wit. Then he gave out a muted kind of whoop. Patrice should know he was having fun.

    He did not sleep much that night. At four, after a long silence suggestive of tranquil intimacy, he opened his bedroom door while keeping up an insistent murmur and went down the stairs backward, bending forward to beat out on the treads with his palms the sound of his companion’s footfall, syncopated with his own. This was the kind of logical plan only a madman might embrace. After seeing his companion to the hall, saying his good-byes between silent kisses, and closing the front door on her with a firmness that resounded through the house, he went upstairs and fell into a doze at last, after six, repeating to himself softly, Judge me by my results. He was up an hour later to be sure of running into Patrice before she left for work and of letting her see how suddenly cheerful he was.

    At the front door she paused, car keys in her hand, the strap of her book-crammed satchel cutting into the shoulder of her floral blouse. No one could doubt it: she looked shattered, drained, though her voice was as bright as ever. She told him that she would be inviting Rodney for dinner that evening, and that he would probably stay the night, and she would appreciate it if he, Michael, would stay clear of the kitchen.

    That happened to be his day for traveling to the Center out at Reading. Dizzy with fatigue, he began the journey staring through his smeared train window at suburban London’s miraculous combination of chaos and dullness and damning himself for his folly. His turn to listen to voices through the wall? Impossible; he would stay out somewhere. Driven from his own home by his wife’s lover? Impossible; he would stay and confront him. A fight with Tarpin? Impossible; he would be stamped into the hallway parquet. Clearly he had been in no state to take decisions or to devise schemes, and from now on he must take into account his unreliable mental state and act conservatively, passively, honestly, and break no rules, do nothing extreme.

    Months later he would violate every element of this resolution, but it was forgotten by the end of that day because Patrice arrived home from work without supplies (there was nothing in the fridge) and the builder did not come to dinner. He saw her only once that night, crossing the hallway with a mug of tea in her hand, looking slumped and gray, less the movie icon, more the overworked primary-school teacher whose private life was awry. Had he been wrong to berate himself on the train, had his plan actually worked, and in her sorrow had she been forced to cancel?

    Reflecting on the night before, he found it extraordinary that after a lifetime of infidelities, a night with an imaginary friend was no less exciting. For the first time in weeks he felt faintly cheerful, even whistled a show tune as he microwaved his supper, and when he saw himself in the gold-leaf Sun King mirror in the cloakroom downstairs, he thought his face had lost some fat and looked purposeful, with a shadow of cheekbone visible, and was, by the light of the thirty-watt bulb, somewhat noble, a possible effect of the sugary cholesterol-lowering yogurt drink he was forcing himself to swallow each morning. When he went to bed, he kept the radio off and lay waiting with the light turned low for the remorseful little tap of her fingernails on his door.

    It did not come, but he was not troubled. Let her pass a white night reexamining her life and what was meaningful, let her weigh in the scales of human worth a horny-handed Tarpin and his shrouded boat against ethereal Beard of planetary renown. The following five nights she stayed home, as far as he could tell, while he was committed to his lectures and other meetings and dinners, and when he came in, usually after midnight, he hoped his confident footfalls gave the impression to the darkened house of a man returning from a tryst.

    On the sixth night, he was free to stay in, and she chose to go out, having spent longer than usual under shower and hair dryer. From his place, a small, deeply recessed window on a first-floor half landing, he watched her go along the garden path and pause by a tall drift of vermilion hollyhocks, pause as though reluctant to leave, and put her hand out to examine a flower. She picked it, squeezing it between newly painted nails of thumb and forefinger, held it a moment to consider, then let it drop to her feet. The summer dress—beige silk, sleeveless, with a single pleat in the small of her back—was new, a signal he was uncertain how to read. She continued to the front gate, and he thought there was heaviness in her step, or at least some slackening of her customary eagerness, and she parted from the curb in the Peugeot at near-normal acceleration.

    But he was less happy that night waiting in, confused again about his judgment, beginning to think he was right after all, his radio prank had sunk him. To help think matters through, he poured a scotch and watched football. In place of dinner he ate a liter tub of strawberry ice cream and prized apart a half kilo of pistachios. He was restless, bothered by unfocused sexual need, and coming to the conclusion that he might as well be having or resuming a real affair. He passed some time turning the pages of his address book, stared at the phone a good while but did not pick it up.

    He drank half the bottle and before eleven fell asleep fully dressed on the bed with the overhead light on, and for several seconds did not know where he was when, some hours later, he was woken by the sound of a voice downstairs. The bedside clock showed two-thirty. It was Patrice talking to Tarpin, and Beard, still fortified by drink, was in the mood to have a word. He stood groggily in the center of the bedroom, swaying a little as he tucked in his shirt. Quietly he opened his door. All the house lights were on, and that was fine; he was already going down the stairs with no thought for the consequences. Patrice was still talking, and as he crossed the hall toward the open sitting-room door he thought that he heard her laughing or singing and that he was about to break up a little celebration.

    But she was alone and crying, sitting hunched forward on the sofa with her shoes lying on their sides on the long glass coffee table. It was an unfamiliar bottled, keening sound. If she had ever cried like this for him, it had been in his absence. He paused in the doorway, and she did not see him at first. She was a sad sight. A handkerchief or tissue was twisted in her hand, her delicate shoulders were bowed and shaking, and Beard was filled with pity. He sensed that a reconciliation was at hand and that all she needed was a gentle touch, kind words, no questions, and she would fold into him and he would take her upstairs, though even in his sudden warmth of feeling, he knew he could not carry her, not even in both arms.

    As he began to cross the room a floorboard creaked and she looked up. Their eyes met, but only for a second, because her hands flew up to her face and covered it as she twisted away. He said her name, and she shook her head. Awkwardly, with her back to him, she got up from the sofa, and walking almost sideways, she stumbled on the polar-bear skin, which tended to slide too easily on the polished wooden floor. He had come close to breaking an ankle once and had despised the rug ever since. He also disliked its leering, wide-open mouth and bared teeth yellowed by exposure to the light. They had never done anything to secure it to the floor, and there was no question of throwing it out because it was a wedding present from her father. She steadied herself, remembered to pick up her shoes, and, with a free hand covering her eyes, hurried past him, flinching as he reached out to touch her arm and beginning to cry again, more freely this time, as she ran up the stairs.

    He turned off the lights in the room and lay on the sofa. Pointless to go after her when she did not want him, and it did not matter now, because he had seen. Too late for her hand to conceal the bruise below her right eye that spread across the top of her cheek, black fading to inflamed red at its edges, swelling under her lower lid, forcing the eye shut. He sighed aloud in resignation. It was inevitable, his duty was clear: he would have to get in his car now and drive to Cricklewood, lean on the doorbell until he had brought Tarpin from his bed, and have it out with him, right there beneath the coach lamp, and surprise his loathed opponent with an astonishing turn of speed and purpose. With eyes narrowing, he thought it through again, lingering on the detail of his right fist bursting through the cartilage of Tarpin’s nose, and then, with minor revisions, he reconsidered the scene through closed eyes, and did not stir until the following morning, when he was woken by the sound of the front door closing as she left for work.

    He held an honorary university post in Geneva and did no teaching there, lent his name, his title, Professor Beard, Nobel laureate, to letterheads, to institutes, signed up to international initiatives, sat on a royal commission on science funding, spoke on the radio in layman’s terms about Einstein or photons or quantum mechanics, helped out with grant applications, was a consultant editor on three scholarly journals, wrote peer reviews and references, took an interest in the gossip, the politics of science, the positioning, the special pleading, the terrifying nationalism, the tweaking of colossal sums out of ignorant ministers and bureaucrats for one more particle accelerator or rented instrument space on a new satellite, appeared at giant conventions in the United States—eleven thousand physicists in one place!—listened to postdocs explain their research, gave with minimal variation the same series of lectures on the calculations underpinning the Beard-Einstein Conflation, which had brought him his prize, awarded prizes and medals himself, accepted honorary degrees, and gave after-dinner speeches and eulogies for retiring or about-to-be-cremated colleagues. In an inward, specialized world he was, courtesy of Stockholm, a celebrity, and he coasted from year to year, vaguely weary of himself, bereft of alternatives. All the excitement and unpredictability was in the private life. Perhaps that was enough; perhaps he had achieved all he could during one brilliant summer in his youth. One thing was certain: two decades had passed since he had last sat down in silence and solitude for hours on end, pencil and pad in hand, to do some thinking, to have an original hypothesis, play with it, pursue it, tease it into life. The occasion never arose—no, that was a weak excuse. He lacked the will, the material, he lacked the spark. He had no new ideas.

    But there was a new government research establishment on the outskirts of Reading, hard against the roar of the motorway’s eastbound section and downwind of a beer factory. The Center was supposed to resemble the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, near Denver, sharing its aims but not its acreage or funding. Michael Beard was the new Center’s first head, though a senior civil servant called Jock Braby did the real work. The administrative buildings, some of whose dividing walls contained asbestos, were not new, and nor were the laboratories, whose purpose had once been to test noxious materials for the building trade. All that was new was a three-meter-high barbed-wire and concrete post fence, with regularly spaced KEEP OUT signs, thrown up around the perimeter of the National Center for Renewable Energy without Beard’s or Braby’s consent. It represented, they soon found out, seventeen percent of the first year’s budget. A sodden twenty-acre field had been bought from a local farmer, and work to begin on drainage was in the planning stage.

    Beard was not wholly skeptical about climate change. It was one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that made up the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it, and expected governments to meet and take action. And of course he knew that a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbed energy in the infrared range, and that humankind was putting these molecules into the atmosphere in significant quantities. But he himself had other things to think about. And he was unimpressed by some of the wild commentary that suggested the world was in peril, that humankind was drifting toward calamity, when coastal cities would disappear under the waves, crops fail, and hundreds of millions of refugees surge from one country, one continent, to another, driven by drought, floods, famine, tempests, unceasing wars for diminishing resources. 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. The end of the world was never pitched in the present, where it could be seen for the fantasy it was, but just around the corner, and when it did not happen, a new issue, a new date, would soon emerge. The old world purified by incendiary violence, washed clean by the blood of the unsaved—that was how it had been for Christian millennial sects: death to the unbelievers! And for Soviet Communists: death to the kulaks! And for Nazis and their thousand-year fantasy: death to the Jews! And then the truly democratic contemporary equivalent, an all-out nuclear war: death to everyone! When that did not happen, and after the Soviet empire had been devoured by its internal contradictions, and in the absence of any other overwhelming concern beyond boring, intransigent global poverty, the apocalyptic tendency had conjured yet another beast.

    But Beard was always on the lookout for an official role with a stipend attached. A couple of long-running sinecures had recently come to an end, and his university salary, lecture fees, and media appearances were never quite sufficient. Fortunately, by the end of the century, the Blair government wished to be, or appear to be, practically rather than merely rhetorically engaged with climate change and announced a number of initiatives, one of which was the Center, a facility for basic research in need of a mortal at its head sprinkled with Stockholm’s magic dust. At the political level, a new minister had been appointed, an ambitious Mancunian with a populist’s touch, proud of his city’s industrial past, who told a press conference that he would tap the genius of the British people by inviting them to submit their own clean-energy ideas and drawings. In front of the cameras he promised that every submission would be answered. Braby’s team—half a dozen underpaid postdoctoral physicists housed in four temporary cabins in a sea of mud—received hundreds of proposals within six weeks. Most were from lonely types working out of garden sheds, a few from start-up companies with zippy logos and patents pending.

    In the winter of 1999, on his weekly visits to the site, Beard would glance through the piles sorted on a makeshift table. In this avalanche of dreams were certain clear motifs. Some proposals used water as a fuel for cars and recycled the emission—water vapor—back into the engine; some were versions of the electric motor or generator whose output exceeded the input and seemed to work from vacuum energy—the energy supposedly found in empty space—or from what Beard thought must be violations of Lenz’s law. All were variants on the perpetual-motion machine. These self-taught inventors seemed to have no awareness of the long history of their devices, or how they would, if they actually worked, destroy the entire basis of modern physics. The nation’s inventors were up against the first and second laws of thermodynamics, a wall of solid lead. One of the postdocs proposed sorting the ideas according to which of the laws they violated, first, second, or both.

    There was another common theme. Some envelopes contained no drawings, only a letter, sometimes half a page, sometimes ten. The author regretfully explained that he—it was always a he—declined to enclose detailed plans because it was well known that government agencies had much to fear from the kind of free energy that his machine would deliver, for it would close off an important tax resource. Or the armed forces would seize on the idea, declare it top-secret, then develop it for their own use. Or conventional energy providers would send round thugs to beat the inventor to a pulp in order to maintain business supremacy. Or someone would steal the idea for

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