solar: the novel
How often do novels portray middle aged scientists and technologists? Moreover, those in the thrall of solar energy? Just finished Ian McEwan’s novel, Solar. Michael Beard, the protagonist, is a Nobel winning physicist with a messy personal life and is on the downside of his career. McEwan paints a comic portrait of a formerly brilliant, still self absorbed, immature and not very honest man, facing old age. The story delivers pot shots at political correctness in academe and the bureaucratic finagling endemic in the government grants game. In what other work of fiction would NREL (the National Renewable Energy Lab) be featured? Not a great novel, but entertaining for its insights on the climate/renewables issue and the compulsions of middle age.