Features

Ursula Griffiths, Sandbach, Cheshire: You have been quoted as saying that you hate comic novels. Yet Solar is a very funny book. Did the comedy arise from the development of the character, Michael Beard, or did you deliberately set out to make the novel comic?

Ian McEwan: I don’t like to think of it as a comic novel so much as a serious novel with funny stretches. The writers of the novels I was thinking of have the impulse to be amusing on every line and it’s impossible to do that. It just sounds very forced. I think the comedy in the broadest sense was there in Solar from the very beginning. There had to be some way of dealing with a subject as vast as climate change and putting in some kind of comic frame just helped to drive the book forwards. Otherwise, a subject can be so serious, so heavy, that a novel can drown itself.

UG: Had you any idea that the angle you have taken in Solar on certain aspects of global warming and climate change would be so topical, given the current controversy about the subject?

IMcE: It was topical when I was first thinking about the book in the late 1990s and it has just grown from being a concern on the margins of serious journalism, of serious science until it has become a subject at the centre of Government and of all our lives. I never had any doubt that the subject was of overwhelming importance and would remain so, but I certainly didn’t have an eye on, for example, Copenhagen, coming up.

Helen Cleaves, London: There is a lot of scientific detail in Solar. How much research did you do for the book and how did you do it?

IMcE: I read a great deal. The literature on climate science now is simply vast. I read a lot of papers, a lot of books and spoke to a number of scientists. The research that was most pleasurable was to head off to Colorado to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory there and then to take to the road with my wife to look for a suitable site for the ending of the novel. Eventually we came across a little town called Lordsburg, which seemed just right, and it was fun to know that I was standing in the place where the novel would end.

Jane Riley, Ipswich: I believe the starting point of Solar was your own experiences on a ship near the North Pole with a group of artists. How much of the novel is based on your experiences at that time?

IMcE: There are passages in the book where the hero is sailing on a ship to Spitzbergen but, of course, I have inserted Michael Beard, who is a very different person, into the situation rather than myself. And I have taken quite a lot of liberties with other details. But the journey was useful. There was a marvellous dissonance between our rather idealistic talk over dinner on board the ship about the nature of responsibility and climate change and the chaos of our living conditions which got worse during the week. Another starting point for me was that I attended a conference on climate change in Potsdam. All the speakers had Nobel Prizes and it was very grand. When I came away I thought maybe, if I ever write this book, I should give my hero a Nobel Prize but make him a bit of a has-been.

Allan Hoyano, Oxford: Your protagonist, Michael Beard, is a man intelligent enough to recognise his own faults, but he is completely unable to grow out
of them. Do you think this is true of most people?

IMcE: I think part of our tragedy, particularly in relation to climate change, is that we have a lot of information and we know broadly what we’d like to do and yet we find it very difficult to do it. In other words, our rationality is often in conflict with other forces like nationalism or tribalism. We saw this play out spectacularly in Copenhagen. So, yes, we are bound by our own natures and by our own shortcomings and we find things very difficult because of them.

JR: Solar is in a very different style to your earlier books. Do you see this as a change in direction?

IMcE: I like to think of every book I write as a change in direction. I like to think that no one could have predicted from the end of On Chesil Beach what the beginning of Solar would be like or could even have guessed the subject matter. For me, part of the long wait between novels is to achieve just that – a new start.

Joe Cushnan, Worksop, Nottinghamshire: 2010 marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of your first book, First Love, Last Rites. What has been the biggest change in you as a writer in those 35 years and what has been the biggest change in publishing?

IMcE: The biggest change in me probably came sometime in the early 1980s – becoming a father, stopping writing for a while and then going back to write A Child in Time. A sort of shift took place around that time. As for publishing, I can only draw on my own experience. Publishing in the 1970s was still a rather dusty, gentlemanly affair. It was still the time of the long two-bottle lunch and accountants were of very little importance. Not much money was made and one distrusted any writer who sold more than a couple of thousand copies of a book. I don’t think novelists in those days were the subject of gossip columns, either. So everything has become a little louder, a little more vulgar, a little more trashy, a little more celebrity-conscious, sales-conscious. Less sleepy and considerably more sparky. More fun in lots of ways.

Further reading...

Solar

by Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape Ltd

Buy now