Word: beard
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...outset of “Solar,” Beard is neither a champion of alternative energy nor persuaded by the dire warnings about rising seas and melting ice. Beard refuses to be won over by the emotional appeals and mass hysteria about a phenomenon that has little immediate impact on his daily life. As one of Beard’s mistresses laments, to take action against global warming “would be to think about it all the time,” something that “daily life would not permit.” But when...
...Saturday,” McEwan employs a series of seemingly random accidents to set his characters on paths that they would not have otherwise contemplated. The main accident in “Solar” is a sudden and unforeseen death that enables Beard to recast himself as a friend of the environment. But “Solar” complicates the theme of accidental change that McEwan returns to so often by incorporating a new idea of willful self-deception. Though Beard believes that “barring accidents, life does not change,” he is constantly...
With each chapter, Beard discards the unwanted pieces of his former life in order to strive for some higher plane of personal or professional achievement. Beard is “a man of science” with “an automatic respect for internal consistency.” He knows truth to be “impregnable,” but he also knows that he can abandon his old life in order to inhabit his own reality. Beard believes that after learning “the tricks of managing, of simply being” he will reach...
...futility inherent to Beard’s personal quest for fulfillment and professional crusade against global warming is personified in his own bodily decay. Beard, the lifelong womanizer, neglects his body against his better judgment and the repeated urging of his doctors. Repeated resolutions to lose weight, exercise, and cut back on his daily drinking fall by the wayside as the vinegary scent of potato chips, cool sensation of a scotch-on-the-rocks, and plush comfort of a hotel bed overwhelm Beard’s reptilian brain. This subtle allusion to the problems inherent in collective action against global...
...Solar” comes to a close, Beard is forced to confront the various deceptions and half-truths that have defined his life. A chameleon, Beard nevertheless begins to lose control of his relationships, of the image he projects on the world, and of his own beliefs and emotions. The man who shunned commitment and love in favor of status, pleasure, and freedom realizes that the only true solace resides in the personal relationships that endure life’s changes. McEwan’s writing becomes increasingly fatalistic and forlorn as the novel progresses, and Beard realizes that even...