Book review: Solar, by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, with his fastidious prose and eye for a wrenching setpiece, has always managed to capture the shock that erupts when chaos enters a neatly calibrated life.

In his latest work, he has done something of a volte-face. In his anti-hero, Michael Beard, the overweight, balding Nobel Laureate with his best years behind him, he journeys with the chaos that is to be inserted into other people's equilibrium.

He has borrowed the MO of Martin Amis, creating a darkly comic series of episodes that reflect the neuroses of our times.

The flabby physicist is a fine if disagreeable creation. Attracted to women and trouble, he half-heartedly trades on his Nobel prize to secure himself a few journeyman posts in which he might, by pure fluke, save the world from environmental catastrophe.

Although he mostly wants to be left unbothered, life has other ideas and his professional and personal worlds collide to send him reeling further away from his dream of uninterrupted sensual overload.

Blending McEwan's sophistication with Beard's low comedy results in a beguiling mix. While the story lacks a thorough spine, it is nevertheless diverting, intelligent and, probably in the face of looming Armageddon, essential.

From April 2010