book review - Solar - Ian McEwan

"Beard was not wholly sceptical about climate change. It was one in a list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action."

This book, with its tactile black cover, arrives as the first major book of the year in terms of the hype and expectation that one of our great writers is serving up his latest offering.

Bearing in mind McEwan's last book was the slim On Chesil Beach, which I felt was 80% about one moment and then had an ending that faded and ran too fast, it was going to be interesting to see what Solar was all about. At 283 pages you expected a start, middle and ending and they were delivered. Split into three parts the years go by and the attitude towards global warming becomes more cynical and opportunistic.

At the centre of what is often a farce is the Nobel prize winning physicist Michael Beard who is introduced as his fifth marriage starts to fall apart. Driven by his passions for sex, booze and crisps Beard lurches through the collapse of his marriage, the death of a colleague and the framing of his wife's former lover with all the lights showing green. In between he does his climate change credentials the world of good by going out to be threatened by polar bears in the artic.

But sensing an opportunity to make some money out of solar power Beard steals his dead colleagues ideas and launches himself into a career as a climate change believer. It is not that he doesn't believe but he is selfishly looking for a role for himself to make something out of it. Mixed in with his preaching about climate change is a need for self satisfaction that is physically shown in his determination to chase skirt and eat and drink himself to death despite doctor's warnings.

Most of the coverage and interviews I've seen with McEwan have focused on the way he uses humour to almost spring a surprise on the reader about the importance of climate change. If there is a personal takeaway from this book it is the way that despite being clearly a clever man Beard spans the nine years of the story getting fatter, more unhealthy and into deeper trouble in his personal relationships. If you want to change, whether that be yourself or the planet, you need to start now. The slide of Beard towards death is a powerful reminder for us all.

Thoughts at the half way point of Solar

There is a humour here that is quite infectious and McEwan must have had fun writing this.

An aging scientist who's marriage and career have seen better days finds himself involved with an organisation that is connected with global warming. As he struggles to sort out his own life the prospect of Michael Beard ever actually doing anything for the planet seems a remote one.

But things have a funny habit of falling into place for Beard and as the second half of the books looms large so does the prospect that the main character can save himself and perhaps do some good for the planet as well.

Review will come on completion soon...

book review: On Chesil Beach

This is one of those books that builds and builds and then delivers a climax that was nowhere near what you were expecting. The same could be said for the characters Edward and Florence in this novella by Ian McEwan.

Both main characters are paralysed with fear of the sexual act. The difference between them is that when it comes to the crunch on their wedding night he can get it up and start to get into the mood but she cannot. In a classic example of the dangers of not communicating she keeps her fears to herself and then gets into position where she has to try to explain something almost impossible.

His feelings are hurt by the reaction to his premature ejaculation and he becomes angry at her decision to run away down the beach. He dresses and goes after her - a move she both anticipates but then angers at because she has walked a good couple of miles by the time he catches up with her.

In one crucial conversation where misunderstanding about fear, love and lust leads them to both boil over their marriage crumbles away. By this point you have stuck with the weaving in of the back-story with the build up to the disaster that happens on the marriage bed. You realise they love each other and are soul mates in a way that most people only ever dream of.

So you are left wondering what happens next. Reading this as a man the expectation was that Edward would swallow his pride and goes and beg forgiveness after his anger cooled down. You might also have expected a similar move from Florence who said some hurtful things but could have pleaded that it was all to do with the heat of the moment.

But instead having played the wedding evening in almost slow motion McEwan then presses the fast forward button and life starts whizzing by with Edward heading into his forties, sixties and old age. For some readers this is probably where the feeling of an unsatisfactory ending creeps in. It happens quickly and it happens easily.

Just as in the telling the back-story McEwan stresses that these two characters might never have met if a different corner had been turned and another decision taken now fate works the other way. Now regardless of the opportunities, and there are presumably several, Florence and Edward do not run into each other again and as the years go by the chance of reconciliation is missed completely. There is a scene where Florence looks out for Edward at a concert she performs and remembers the promise he made many years before to be there but that is the only hint that she might have gone back to him. For Edward’s part his life drifts and you sense the missed opportunities that would have come if he had a life with Florence. With age comes wisdom and he realises that those words on the beach did not mean what he took them to mean and he should have been more patient.

It would have been interesting to see them meet again after the years of absence but that lingering thought for what might have been is exactly the one McEwan wants to leave you with. In that sense although the fast forwarding at the end could have been slowed a bit the book works and you leave it determined to listen more and speak less in an argument concerning love.

Version read – Vintage paperback

On Chesil Beach - post II

The second half of this novella doesn’t quite go in the direction you expect. The build up to the sexual act on their weeding eve has been countered with the back story of how Edward and Florence fell in love.

It is clear that the music loving Florence has found her soul mate in Edward and they plan to live happily ever after if she can just get over her worries and clammed up fears of sex. For Edward, a typical man, he expects to carry out his duty and get some pleasure out of it. He knows that Florence is very slow at coming to anything sexual but expects that as it is their wedding night she will allow him to at least consummate the marriage.

His biggest fear is premature ejaculation and ironically that occurs because Florence boldly touches him setting off a reaction he cannot stop. But that is when things fall apart because she runs from the room after being disgusted at the ejaculation over her body and heads for the beach.

Edward is clearly angry and humiliated at what has happened and after a while puts on his clothes and heads along the beach to find her. With her fears in the open it also liberates her anger and Florence wounds Edward and in a few critical sentences their marriage falls apart and she runs off to go home and he heads back to an empty honeymoon suite. He fails to understand her fears and her wish for patience.

That turn of events might not have been the one you were expecting but then with most of us pre-programmed for a happy ending you read on waiting for the reconciliation. But McEwan has other ideas and with Edward’s life on fast forward he skips through the next forty years leaving you in no doubt that those critical moments on Chesil Beach haunted him for the rest of his life and the love he lost was the most powerful he had ever known.

A review will follow soon…

On Chesil Beach - Post I

With a couple of his books under the belt and the fact that his name is everywhere it seemed like a good idea to bring things up-to-date and read Ian McEwan’s latest book.

Without going into too much detail the prospect of intimate relations with my wife on my wedding night never filled me with dread. When it came to the moment the problem was just staying awake – after a full couple of days preparing and then getting married. However for the husband and wife in this story that is far from the case.

It harks back to a different age when sex was a taboo subject for some people and the idea of participating in the act filled some people with dread.

The story moves like waves coming and going from the present to the past as McEwan weaves a story around how Florence and Edward are on honeymoon, met, fell in love and got married. The elephant in the room, to use a phrase, is that at the end of the lovely meal they are enjoying in the hotel overlooking the path down to Chesil beach in Dorset they will of course have to consummate their marriage.

Both husband and wife are scared of the idea but Florence more so. She takes the odd decision to appear to initiate the move from the dining table to the bedroom so that her husband will not detect her fear. Meanwhile he is starting to allow his primal desires to kick in and you sense that as the story comes back from revealing how and where they met and the bedroom looms large again, that there will be some sort of showdown.

The writing is fluid and easy to consume even if it is initially a bit disappointing that this is going to be focused on the sexual act. But the description of their lives, location and motivation is handled so simply that you picture it all without ever realising the picture has been painted so well for you/

The second half will be posted about over the weekend…

book review - The Cement Garden

Sometimes authors choose to allude to a case of cause and effect and in other cases the results become the content of the novel. Ian McEwan chooses to show the consequences of the death of both parents to a family of four, all at various ages under 19.

The first to go is the father, who is remote and not particularly missed after he keels over with a heart attack while laying out a cement path in the garden. The family gravitates around the mother but she is ill and starts to head downhill. Even before she dies each of the children have had some character quirks outlined. The main focus, Jack, starts to lose interest in hygiene and social relationships and his much younger brother Tom toys with the idea of becoming a girl. The mother is ironically not that strong a character. She doesn't say a great deal and for the last few weeks of her life she is bedbound. But her death removes any pretence that the family can carry on as normal.

Once the mother dies the cracks, both literal and metaphorical appear and the house, with its cement filled garden, becomes cut off from reality in almost every sense of the word. The cement is used to bury the mother in a trunk in the cellar. Finally there is an entrant from the outside worlds in the form of the eldest girl’s boyfriend. He discovers the secret in the cellar and in the end, after catching jack and his sister involved in incest, calls in social services to end the situation.

But before Derek makes the call to get other people involved with the family things have really fallen apart. Tom has started dressing as a girl and then entered a baby phase. Sue the next in age lives in the pages of her diary, which she addresses to her mother. Jack drifts through the day never knowing the time or washing and Julie plays at being the mother but has a tendency to revert to being immature.

Without the support and the moral guidelines of the mother the children quickly lose routine, self-responsibility and any motivation for interacting with the world and the prospect of returning to school at the end of the holidays is dismissed by Jack.

The final scene has been brewing and in some ways is over done in that you almost don’t need to see where the logical conclusion of their world goes without boundaries. What you have to give McEwan credit for is the ability to create a sense of place. The summer heat and the strangeness of the large house with the corpse in the cellar is something you can picture very clearly. Of the few McEwan books I have managed to read it is always this sense of place that is brilliantly done and it is the same here. The story might not always be comfortable to read and the way of showing how the grief is impacting the children sometimes feel too much but it does leave you thinking and that is a positive.

Version read - Vintage paperback

Lunchtime read: The Cement Garden

After reading the conclusion of The Cement Garden along with Castle in the Forest last year I have come to the conclusion that I am a prude. I understand the way that crude sexual acts can be used to deliberately provoke a reaction in the reader, but that doesn’t mean you have to like them.

The finale of the Cement Garden sees an act of incest that is clumsy but reasonably graphic. Of course it symbolises the complete breakdown not just of authority but morality of the four orphans. But is also leaves you wondering why it is necessary to spell it out so clearly when paraphrasing or mentioning it in passing would have done just as well.

At the end you hear the slamming of car doors and the people heading towards the door and you know that the end of the summer has resulted in the end of their freedom. Derek, Julie’s boyfriend might have been the catalyst but the result probably would have been the same anyway.

You feel some sympathy but also a fair amount of horror at what has happened to the teenagers in the wake of their parent’s death.

A review will follow soon…

Lunchtime read: The Cement Garden

Trying to sum up today’s reading is not easy. The main development seems to be the way that the family pull together only to then split apart under the dual influences of Julies boyfriend and Tom’s odd way of grieving.

In the first instance Derek, a snooker player with a flash car, turns up and adds more flesh to the life that the newly smoking Julie is leading beyond the house. Jack doesn’t like him but Sue is okay about the entry of a stranger into their odd world.

The youngest child Tom however starts to dress as a girl. Something he had joked about when his mother was alive no becomes awkwardly real. Then he seems to move on from that phase, partly because he is hit out of it, and starts to regress to become a baby.

It is clear to see that the children are each crippled in their own way by grief and the weight of being orphans and McEwan manages to inform you of their pain without the characters themselves being able to do a great deal about it.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The Cement Garden

The idea that a death of a parent can be kept secret starts to become core to the story. As a result of being orphaned the children start to fall apart leaving food to go off and their routine to fall apart.

The battle for supremacy continues between the eldest children but the disintegration of the family unit, which comes together briefly when the mother is buried in concrete in the cellar, soon drifts apart again.

It is hard to like the main voice, Jack, not just because he is a loner but because he seems to deliberately set himself apart from the world. As a piece of fiction that gives a description of a 15 year old attitude it is accurate.

What should be interesting is the pattern the family fall into once the school holidays end and the grief has started to ease.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The Cement Garden

There is always a hint of the incestuous with the close knit family with Jack the main character being aroused at the sight of any substantial quantity of his sister’s body. But over hanging the family is the slow decline of the mother who becomes bedridden and then finally dies.

For Jack and his elder sister Julie the question with their mother’s death becomes one of control. Who will now run the family and be in a position to give orders? Jack was told by his mother it would be a task for both of them but that message was never passed on before her death.

Meanwhile the teenager becomes isolated and unkempt being ashamed of his acne and of his lack of friendships, even in his own family.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The Cement Garden

In its attempt to try and summarise the noughties so far the Guardian put together a series of articles in one of its issues last week to encapsulate the last seven years. When it came to looking back over literature one of the main conclusions was that these last few years have been dominated by Ian McEwan.

Having read Saturday last year and before that a few years ago Enduring Love and enjoyed the former much more than the latter it seemed like a good idea to expand the knowledge of this writer.

The Cement Garden has an almost Norman Mailer feel to it with its content including equal doses of death and masturbation. It also echoes the family theme that ran through Caste in the Forest. But there is more of an Englishness to it so the characters are awkwardly self-aware with the four children and the family unit being very natural.

The father orders 15 bags of cement to cover the front, side and back of the house in concrete. He has been warned off heavy labour because of a heart attack but he cannot resist working with his eldest son to start laying a path. He drops dead and leaves two daughters and two brothers left with a mother who is also dying. There are clearly tensions in the family, not just because of the death but because of the problems caused by adolescence.

The future looks bleak for the children. More tomorrow…

book review: Saturday

One of the advantages you get from reading classics is that with the author six feet under you come to it with a reputation established and acres of analysis already completed. With someone still living there is a chance for the reader to make up his or her own mind. Maybe that is a prospect that is in itself slightly disturbing because there is a strong chance a book will disappoint and you won’t have the numerous views of others to lean on when making your own judgement.

Ian McEwan’s Saturday is slightly different because not only have critics deemed it a modern classic but also sales figures show that readers seem to agree.

One of the challenges is to work with a book that is so clearly set on one day at one moment – Saturday, 15 February 2003. There are a lot of specifics that create not just an impression but an exact picture of a neurosurgeon moving around a world of hard work but certain wealth in London. This is pre-Iraq war because the momentum towards the conflict is building despite the resistance of the public and the UN. But the Twin Towers had occurred so this is a book about one a very clear level terror and the challenge of living in its shadow.

But there are also other things going on here that make it not just a simplistic reaction taking someone comfortable and to a degree insulated and viewing the new uncertain world through their eyes. There is the question of what is worse – real terror or the imagined kind. Then there are some issues about class with Baxter being clearly from a different world compared to Henry the surgeon and his family. Family is important here with it being everything that matters to Henry and in the end something he is prepared to almost die for. But family is also a route for genetic flaws to pass down through the generations. Baxter with his Huntington’s disease is the most graphic example of that but Henry is also losing control of his own children as they grow and take the characteristics their parents gave them and move beyond them to become successful in their own right. Henry accepts that his fate will be to follow in the footsteps of his senile mother who he visits on Saturday afternoon.

What keeps a book that could have not only easily dated but got bogged down in politics going is the central character Henry Perowne. He is likeable, quite willing to please and generates the tension with the final involvement with Baxter who he could so easily have punished for breaking into his home at knife point and humiliating his daughter and threatening his wife. Maybe the fact that poetry saved their lives and sparked off something in Baxter spurred on Henry's decision to forgive rather than revenge.

Along with Henry the structure of the book also works with it covering the action of one particularly long Saturday. Although the reader knows that this is one day, a snapshot, into a life and a family. The war of course went ahead and the war on terror rumbles on and the bombs did come to London as predicted in the closing pages. But it is because it is one day and it has to have en ending that makes it so accessible. It is possible to grasp that there is a shadow over everyone’s lives, part of the reason for Henry waking and looking to the skies, which makes you feel surrounded by potential danger.

It doesn’t matter if you are a neurosurgeon, thug like Baxter or a poet the key to Saturday is that it shows a mirror to the fears and reactions to a new landscape. This book, more probably than most of the political histories of the Blair and Bush years that have been written and will come, manages to convey the sense of what it has been and continues to be like for those living in the shadow of the unknown.

Version read – Vintage paperback

Lunchtime read: Saturday

The book ends on a philosophical note with musings on the war on terror, parental love and the difference between punishment and forgiveness. At the end there is a page of acknowledgements to the doctors that helped McEwan with the medical terminology and it is so well researched that when ever the hospital scenes are mentioned there is a shift into a clinical world of assured description.

The suspense is stoked up by the question of whether or not Henry will carry out some sort of revenge when he goes into operate on Baxter who has a fractured skull. He goes in and the suspense is maintained right to the end, even when he returns home you half expect him to admit to killing the intruder.

The reality is that he has searched his soul and decided that he is going to try and get his family to forgive Baxter so he can spend his last few years alive rather than in prison. He then returns home to the comfort of his wife and they celebrate the love they have for each other. They talk about the shock, the terror and the family and the future disruption their daughter’s pregnancy will cause.

Henry then wakes and hears the planes overhead and stands looking out of the window in the same way he had done when the day started. But now there is a more philosophical attitude to the possibility of terror and ageing and he settles back into bed and finally goes to sleep.

A review probably at the weekend…

Lunchtime read: Saturday

The only other McEwan book I’ve read is Amsterdam and there was a shift in pace with that book as it reached the end and the same ability to quicken the pulse is in evidence here as part four closes in spectacular fashion.

At the back of your mind the confrontation with Baxter has overshadowed the book and was ready for some sort of conclusion. Why be worried about potential terrorist attacks and imaginary demons when you can settle for real fear instead.

Ironically Baxter manages to reconcile the family and bring them closer together much more successfully than Henry could have done. Up to that point he has argued with his daughter struggled to see eye to eye with his father-in-law and heading for a tense supper with the only refugee being his wife. But when she appears it is not alone and a knife wielding Baxter walks in for his revenge.

He breaks the father-in-law’s nose, forces his daughter to strip naked and read poetry and holds a knife to Rosalind’s neck. The tension is only broken up by a quick thinking Theo who along with Henry wrestles Baxter to the floor and calls the Police. The rest of the evening is spent with them comparing notes on the incident and sharing their feelings. No one discusses the other revelation, which was the result of Daisy being forced to undress, that Henry’s daughter is pregnant.

But before they get the chance Henry is called away to work on Baxter who has been brought into his hospital for emergency treatment. How will Henry treat the patient who so recently broke into his home at knife point?

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: Saturday

When the question was being raised in the run up to the Iraq war of which side you took it was always a chance to get involved in a unnecessary argument that quickly became heated. When Henry’s daughter Daisy turns up she ends up in a similar one with her father.

His view of the war, which borders on a sort of tired indifference, is quite common and you could argue that it was as a result of so many people taking that line Blair and Bush did not have as much opposition. But the arguments laid out are easy to identify with and still rumble on with it the question of whether or not it was better to get rid of a tyrant and replace him with some sort of quasi-democracy or to hedge him in and try to control him through the international community.

The argument between Henry and Daisy in the first chunk of part four is eerily reminiscent of conversations that ruined friendships a few years ago.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: Saturday

There is always that tendency by people to say that the lucky ones are those who don’t have to live through the conflict. It is usually applied to major conflicts like the major world wars but McEwan makes you wonder about that with the war on terror. Henry goes to visit his mother and the rest of chapter III is taken up with him driving out to see her and then having to sit through her not knowing who he is and where she is.

With the TV in the lounge of the old people’s home broadcasting pictures without sounds of the anti-war march maybe it is better not to know what is going on. Maybe it is preferable to be in a state of childhood where all that matters is getting home in time for tea with your mother?

It is an interesting idea and there is also the spin that here is a brain surgeon dealing with some one with advanced dementia who not only knows what processes have happened in her brain to get her to that state but also knows that it could well happen to him as well at some point in the future. Again the question would be - would it not be better not to have a clue about what might happen to your brain?

Lets see what other questions come next. More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: Saturday

One of the interesting parts of having been involved in a short act of violence is that it plays through your mind for days and weeks afterwards. The same is true of Henry who has to go from his encounter with the muggers straight into a squash game. His mind is elsewhere and it takes him time not just to settle but get rid of the aggression that flows through his system.

Where McEwan gets it right is in the way he manages to get a 40 something character with more money and medical knowledge than certainly ninety off per cent of the readers and yet make his feelings something that can easily be identified. That must be the gamble of setting it so definitely in a known context. Just as he describes the various unknown reactions to the Iraq war no doubt there was a hidden reference there to the inevitability that some readers will by this point have sided firmly with Henry or as the third chapter begins will have decided they can’t stand him. I still like him but we’ll see if that continues.

More tomorrow….

Lunchtime read: Saturday

Not much reading again because of a constant headache. But did manage a lunchtime read and a good 30 pages where Henry almost gets a beating after having a prang and smashing off a wing mirror. The irony is that the men want £75 cash rather than going down the legal route of exchanging insurance details.

My mother in law backed into someone recently and roughly the same amount was asked for. It must be the sum that people who don’t bother with insurance plumb for.

Anyway Henry refuses and is on the brink of getting a beating when he speaks to the ringleader, who is can clearly diagnose with Huntington’s disease. While he talks to him about possibilities for treatments the moment when he could have taken a beating passes and two of the gang that was on the brink of swinging punches heads off to Tottenham Court Road to watch the anti-war marchers.

having introduced the idea of fear of terrorism and a suspicion that voilence is all around McEwan steps it up to become something that is much more personal. Having painted the little pocket of London around Euston/Warren Street as being quite swanky suddenly the reality of London kicks in with the voilence around every corner. That is not something new from 9/11 but ever since I have lived in the capital has been there.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: Saturday

I am not feeling very well today so the reading has suffered. As I feared all I managed to do on the lunchtime reading front were again 20 pages. The more you sit on the shoulder of Henry Perowne the more you like him because the success of a career and the trappings of wealth sit very casually with him.

He wanders around his home on the Saturday morning getting ready to go off and play his squash game and goes past the library, accepting that he never thought he would live in a home with a library. He feels grateful for the relationship he has with his daughter and the literary arguments they enjoy together.

As he wanders out into London the crowds are gathering for an anti-Iraq war march and the papers are full of headlines about the UN trying to get the US and UK to show restraint and wait but of course it seems unlikely that will happen.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: Saturday

Sadly at the rate of just 20 odd pages a day this is not going to get read as quickly as I hoped. It might be about one day in the life but it might well take more than a week in the consuming.

The more you find out about Henry, the central figure, the more you can’t help but like him. The second part of chapter one details how he met his wife Rosalind. As a 19 year -old law graduate suffering from a brain tumour he met her in the ward and wooed her and after finally shuffling into replaced the relationship she had with her dead mother he recognises that he will have to marry her.

He waits for his daughter to come later that Saturday evening. He seems to like as well as want to be a fatherly protector of his daughter who is trying her hand at trying to become a poet.

The sounds of nearby Euston road start to mount and even on a Saturday morning London starts to get into full swing and while McEwan makes the comment that sun rises are for rural landscapes the sound of traffic is the capital’s equivalent.

More, hopefully a bit more, tomorrow…