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    Solar
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    Solar
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    Solar
    Audiobook12 hours

    Solar

    Written by Ian McEwan

    Narrated by Roger Allam

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Universally acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest novelists, Ian McEwan is a Booker Prize-winning, best-selling literary master. He displays a fresh facet of his considerable talent in Solar, a satirical novel rife with blistering humor. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is fast approaching 60, a mere shell of the academic titan he once was. While his fifth marriage falls apart, Michael suddenly finds himself with an unexpected opportunity to reinvigorate his career and possibly save humankind from the growing threat of global warming.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateApr 2, 2010
    ISBN9781449808662
    Unavailable
    Solar
    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

    1,039 ratings92 reviews

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    • 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
      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. :-(
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 3/5
      I've read worse...
    • 4/5
      His use of english is outstanding!!! So far his other books are as good. WOW!
    • 3/5
      Meh. McEwan can do better.
    • 2/5
      I'm beginning to wonder if contemporary fiction is becoming an impossible task for me. It often begins to seem like work to force a book to its conclusion, when it seems like most of them are simply sex fantasies of middle aged men writing about middle aged, overweight, self-indulgent men having sex with numerous much younger women...oh, and putting some sort of other story around it that takes up about one-quarter of the text and is meant to justify yet another book about middle aged, overweight, self-indulgent men having sex with numerous much younger women. It doesn't help that this book peddles some much abused tropes about women in science (granted, it does present the rationality of the position of women's rights advocates eventually, but that is overlain by the nonsense spouted by the main character, probably to make us realize what an ass he is, but unfortunately handled in a way that makes it look unanswered), environmentalism (again, the author appears to be on the side of the angels, but a denier would find much to like in this book), and the arts (here, I can give nothing. The author basically allowed the main character, a physicist, to have his say on the arts without much dispute, other than putting in a couple of artists who were nice, pleasant people, but still appeared frivolous and ignorant in comparison to physics). The book left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth. If authors want to show us unpleasant characters doing unpleasant things to make us dislike them, fine, but there are ways to do it that don't leave you feeling like you've just swum in the sewer.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 2/5
      I like Ian McEwan but could not finish this book - trying too hard to be Malcolm Bradbury, another author I struggle with.
    • 3/5
      I'm afraid I have to agree with Walter Kirn's review of this book in the NYTBR, in which he asserts that Solar is so good, it's bad. McEwan's writing, as always, is technically perfect and there are more than occasional flashes of brilliant insight and mordant wit, but all the highly polished individual elements somehow don't quite add up to a convincing or satisfying whole. Michael Beard's foibles are neither charmingly eccentric nor compellingly sinister, and the book reads less like a novel than a series of set pieces lined up to illustrate a screed about the current state of the world. McEwan's fearsome intellect being what it is, his observations and opinions are well worth reading, but perhaps they would have found better expression in another form.
    • 5/5
      I would feel ridiculous grading an Ian McEwan novel, so I won’t. The story is a comic exaggeration of some very real situations. The most commonplace is that of the rather repulsive, if brilliant, man who attracts an unreasonable number of exceptional women. Why is that? Surely they can do better than this guy. Then there is the scientific and technological intrigue. McEwan weaves all that together in the contest of a pressing issue of global scale. The story moves fast.
    • 4/5
      Ian McEwan has written books that I love (?Atonement,? ?Amsterdam,? ?Enduring Love?) and books that I hate (?On Chesil Beach?, ?Saturday?). ?Solar? is somewhere in the middle. ?Solar? tells the story of Michael Beard, an unpleasant, overweight, has-been physicist, who won the Nobel prize for work he did as a very young scientist, but who has never had a follow-up success. He?s been married and divorced five times and has had dozens of affairs but no offspring. Near the beginning of the book, his latest wife?s lover, who is also one of Beard?s postdocs, dies accidently, and Beard steals his idea for replicating photosynthesis and creating cheap, clean energy from sunlight. The book has some hilarious scenes, including one in which Beard decides to hop off his snowmobile in the Artic to take a quick pee, not considering what might happen when damp human flesh comes in contact with a metal zipper in subfreezing weather. The plot is complicated, and at times it seems that McEwan couldn?t decide which of a number of different novels he wanted to write. The various strands all come together in the end, but in a way that seems forced and faintly ridiculous. It?s a fun book to read, but it doesn?t have anywhere near the depth or sticking power of McEwan?s best works.
    • 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.
    • 2/5
      disappointing. annoying character and little point.
    • 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.
    • 4/5
      Very good book of Ian Mcewan. Narrated in a comic mood with cynical and ironic comments, this book tells the story of Michael Beard, a Nobel Prized Physicist. The protagonist is a selfish chauvinist type the like Dr House from Tv series, and shows the kind of personality that is so in vogue today. He uses his inteligence to manipulate women and the ones that surrounds him, however his inability to deal with true emotions and his focus on near term satisfaction will put him in a very complicated situation. The book can be read as a methafor of our own inability to start doing something to solve the big issues that faces humanity, like global warming. Also it can be seen as how the near term satisfaction can become a very bad future. Michael Beard seems to be a very bad person, exploring women to have sex and friendship to gain status, however the bookalso shows his weak personality, insecure and his undeciseveness. Thos is a good book to read during your vacations, and think how much you share some of Michael Beard characteristics.
    • 1/5
      This was chosen by our work Book Group or I would have abandoned it fairly early on.

      Solar tells the story of Michael Beard, Nobel Laureate for Physics, at three points in his live: 2000, 2005 & 2009. His is an obnoxious character: a serial womaniser with 5 ex-wives, he is pompous and has rested on his laurels since he won his Nobel Laureate. To add to this, he is fat & lazy, continously planning to do something about his weight problem but constantly procrastinating and indulging himself. He lies and cheats his way through his private, public & working life, leaving a trail of broken lives behind him. A totally unsympathetic character.

      So, what is the 'story'? After a few excrutiating incidents around the dissolution of his 5th marriage and a trip to the arctic, a 'shocking' incident puts him in a position of opportunity: does he use this in a constructive way or take advantage?

      Events jump to 2005 and we see him with a new woman, flat, job etc. etc. Again, various situations and opportunities open themselves up to him and again, the question of how he'll react is placed before us.

      Ditto with 2009 and the final denouement.

      The thing is, you just know how he'll react (if not always precisely what he'll do). There is very little to surprise in the book and the ending was so obvious..... I found the various 'incidents' excruciating and obvious, in particular the 'crisp incident'.

      I guess it's supposed to be a moral tale. We're not supposed to like the character, we're supposed to side with everyone else in the book. Even so, I didn't enjoy this (as is obvious), I wouldn't have finished it if it wasn't the Book Group choice and I certainly won't read anything else by this author. (I did read Chesil Beach a year or so ago & didn't particularly enjoy that either).
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 3/5
      I'm afraid I have to agree with Walter Kirn's review of this book in the NYTBR, in which he asserts that Solar is so good, it's bad. McEwan's writing, as always, is technically perfect and there are more than occasional flashes of brilliant insight and mordant wit, but all the highly polished individual elements somehow don't quite add up to a convincing or satisfying whole. Michael Beard's foibles are neither charmingly eccentric nor compellingly sinister, and the book reads less like a novel than a series of set pieces lined up to illustrate a screed about the current state of the world. McEwan's fearsome intellect being what it is, his observations and opinions are well worth reading, but perhaps they would have found better expression in another form.
    • 4/5
      Ian McEwan has written books that I love (“Atonement,” “Amsterdam,” “Enduring Love”) and books that I hate (“On Chesil Beach”, “Saturday”). “Solar” is somewhere in the middle. “Solar” tells the story of Michael Beard, an unpleasant, overweight, has-been physicist, who won the Nobel prize for work he did as a very young scientist, but who has never had a follow-up success. He’s been married and divorced five times and has had dozens of affairs but no offspring. Near the beginning of the book, his latest wife’s lover, who is also one of Beard’s postdocs, dies accidently, and Beard steals his idea for replicating photosynthesis and creating cheap, clean energy from sunlight. The book has some hilarious scenes, including one in which Beard decides to hop off his snowmobile in the Artic to take a quick pee, not considering what might happen when damp human flesh comes in contact with a metal zipper in subfreezing weather. The plot is complicated, and at times it seems that McEwan couldn’t decide which of a number of different novels he wanted to write. The various strands all come together in the end, but in a way that seems forced and faintly ridiculous. It’s a fun book to read, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the depth or sticking power of McEwan’s best works.
    • 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.
    • 2/5
      You know that old story about the bloke who buys some biscuits in a cafe, then sits at a table with a complete stranger. He eats one of his biscuits, and then is shocked when the other man takes one of the biscuits? McEwan turns that old chestnut into six-pages of over-baked prose in Solar. He later admits it’s a variation on an urban legend, the Unwitting Thief; but then so many parts of this books feel like variations on urban legends. McEwan also thinks airlines serve food on flights between London and Berlin – I didn’t think they bothered anymore for journeys of less than three or four hours, but perhaps I’m wrong. The protagonist is a womanising scientist who has been trading on his Nobel laureate for much of his career. He’s not so much a product of his time as a product of McEwan’s time, because he reads like a lecherous and sexist pig. His marriage is failing, his current job feels like a waste of time, and then he accidentally causes the death of his wife’s lover and frames his wife’s ex-lover for it, and uses it as a springboard to boost his own career. There’s some solid argument for anthropogenic global warming and against all the dumb climate change deniers, but everything esle in the novel is sadly quite bad. The protagonist is unlikeable, the female characters are badly drawn, elements of the plot seem to have been lifted from snopes.com, and there are assorted rants against “postmodernism” – which it is not: McEwan is just ranting against critics of male white privilege. I was much impressed by McEwan’s earlier novels when I read them back in the 1990s, but this century I’ve found them increasingly disappointing. Saturday, in fact, I thought awful. I only continued to read him out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. But after Solar, I purged my TBR of McEwan’s novels and I’ll no longer bother reading him. Life is too short.