Solar by Ian McEwan

A review by Hephzibah Anderson

To take global warming seriously would mean thinking about it all the time, says a character in Ian McEwan's new novel. And that's impossible, she adds: "Daily life would not allow it."

Happily for skeptics and believers alike, Solar is serious only in a Charlie Chaplinesque way. It's a farce with a somber message -- a satirical parable of human nature in all its entertaining, doomed folly.

The story pivots on a freak accident that catapults a tubby physicist, Michael Beard, to the forefront of the race to find a sustainable energy source. Pursuing this worthy goal in the run- up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change, the balding British boffin will clock thousands of air miles and resort to intellectual property theft and worse.

Beard is a Falstaffian character, both in his gluttonous appetites and his implausibility. While in his 20s, he wrote a paper that led to a Nobel Prize for his contribution to quantum theory, the "Beard-Einstein Conflation." He has been...

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