Showing posts with label Solar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Solar. Show all posts

Solar by Ian McEwan (2010)

, 4 Oct 2014

I wanted to give another opportunity to McEwan after reading Saturday, which I did not enjoy and found over-praised. After all, McEwan is one of the most prestigious writers in the English-speaking world, and I thought he deserved it.

Solar is the story of a Nobel-Prize middle-aged
physicist who is having a complete life meltdown. He is having a marriage crisis with his fifth wife, and, a professional level, he has no new ideas or research going on, lives on the glories of the past, but is put in charge of a new Research Institute devoted to Renewable Energies that need of new ideas. The anti-hero of the book is so real that reminded me of some real researchers I have found in my own academic life in the past. 

There is no doubt that McEwan's English is good and precise, and that he creates perfectly-delineated characters, as real as life itself, based on a meticulous research work. So much so that the characters, what they do, how they move, what they think, how they express themselves is completely convincing and realistic. His fictional characters do exist, also, because McEwan creates a realist fictional environment that envelopes his characters, drawn with the same surgical precision. 

Solar's narrative, however, and as a result is slow and frustrating, as the detail becomes a sea of tar you have to swim across to get to the point. Really annoying. In other words, McEwan's plot, initially interesting and original, becomes a succession of details. His characters are static, over-drawn in a way, as if they were wearing too much clothing and disappeared underneath it. On the contrary, the plot is a peremptory and unrealistic combination of events that seem not to make any sense, no matter the fact that this is, in a way, a comic book. If this was not enough, the end of the book is irresolute, imperfect, as if McEwan had got lost in his own microcosms and was not able to see the horizon and to put a bright closure to the story.

Solar has not clear chapters or sections, so reading the book becomes a pain, as the continuity is too... continuous? It reminded me of Saramago, who made an anti-art of this.

It took me ages to finish the book, just out of stubbornness more than out of pleasure, no matter the spark of some moments.