Ian McEwan’s “Solar” is great stuff, a serio-comic masterpiece in the Kingsley Amis mould centring on a flawed, overweight, middle-aged lothario whose life just gets more and more hideously complicated as the book proceeds. “Solar” is a grand satire on the human condition – how the soaring flights of the intellect will always be brought crashing to earth by the lusts and weaknesses of the body. It’s also, in the process, a wistful prediction of the unlikelihood that humanity will ever manage to get its arse in gear and do something about global warming. Our protag, Michael Beard, is a Nobel laureate and incorrigible philanderer who, as the novel begins, is on the receiving end of some long-overdue poetic justice: his wife Patrice, whom he has deceived many times, is now conducting a vigorous affair with the local builder. Beard tries to blot out this humiliating defeat by focusing on his work: an experimental wind turbine with little chance of success, but on which hangs the reputation of the government research facility Beard heads.

One of the post-docs under Beard’s command is a gangly genius named Tom Aldous, who despite his talent has an uncanny knack of getting on everyone’s tits. Aldous hero-worships Beard – whose Nobel was earned on the back of his work around Einstein’s photovoltaics, the theory by which sunlight can be used to store energy – and is continually pestering him to read his notes on how Beard’s theories can be put to use in simulating the process of photosynthesis, and thus solve the problems of global warming and the energy crisis in one fell swoop. Beard, however, is still preoccupied with his wife’s infidelity and the immediate problem of his wind turbine – plus Aldous, as previously stated, gets on his tits, so he ignores the younger man’s pleas. To get away from it all Beard impulsively agrees to take part in an all-expenses-paid trip to the Arctic circle, there (ostensibly) to gather data on the melting ice-caps. Here McEwan excels himself: Beard’s interlude in the polar wastes is flat-out comic genius. Beard finds himself billeted with a group of tree-hugging artists and writers, with whom he unexpectedly bonds despite the underlying sourness of his mood. The writing here is superb; McEwan’s descriptions of the escalating chaos of the communal changing-room, the drunken bonhomie of the wine-fuelled evening meals, Beard’s panic on the ice as he tries to relieve himself in subzero conditions and finds his anatomy has fused to the metal of his fly, Beard’s later panic as he tries to escape an advancing polar bear on a snowmobile… This is by far the best section of the novel, and the laser-beam precision of McEwan’s prose is simply breathtaking.

Once Beard returns from his Arctic adventure, the absurdities take on a darker hue. It had been bad enough to learn his wife was screwing the builder – but now, as he walks into his own home, he finds she has now seduced – of all people – Tom Aldous, his irritating young admirer. He finds Aldous still wet from the shower in Beard’s living room; Patrice, evidently, is at work. Aldous pleads with Beard to overlook his indiscretion, still desperate to involve him in his photosynthesis project, his life’s work; but Beard is coldly indifferent, and orders him out of the house. In the course of the altercation Aldous slips spectacularly on a polar-bear rug and is killed outright when his skull hits a glass coffee-table. Horrified at first, Beard soon sees a way to turn the tragedy to his advantage. Calculatingly he plants evidence incriminating his wife’s rival lover, the builder, in Aldous’s death. Fortunately for Beard’s purposes the builder has left a series of death threats on Patrice’s answering machine, and (it later transpires) has entreated her to murder Aldous in his sleep; all of this goes very badly for him in the subsequent trial, and the innocent is jailed for murder.

Now separated from Patrice, and forced to resign from his post at the institute (for political reasons), Beard starts to read through the notes Aldous left him and sees that the young genius really was onto something. Now working at Imperial College, he puts together a research project to develop Aldous’s photosynthesis theories – which, of course, he has now claimed as his own. Years pass, and Beard acquires not only an idealised mistress, who appears not to begrudge him his occasional indiscretions, but also a multi-million dollar realisation of “his” photosynthesis project, based outside a small town in Texas, where a field of experimental solar cells has been constructed to convert CO2, sunlight and water into hydrogen and oxygen. The big day is approaching, when the cells will be switched on and electricity will flow into the town, heralding the start of a bold new era in cheap, renewable energy. A military flypast is organised, a brass band, representatives from the press; with the seventeen new patents registered under his name, it looks as if things are finally going Beard’s way. If only he can somehow sidestep the forces assembling against him: the fraud charges raised by Aldous’s father, and the return of Patrice’s ex-lover, the vengeful builder wrongly jailed for Aldous’s murder…

Beard is a wonderfully vivid creation, sympathetic and likeable even when engaged in profoundly unsympathetic and unlikeable deeds (which, as the above synopsis shows, is pretty much all the time). Beard only starts to lose our trust quite late in the day, with his appalling treatment of his latest conquest, the lovely Melissa; she selflessly endures his boorish tendencies, and proves herself in every way the perfect companion, though that still doesn’t stop Beard from picking up a cheap waitress during his stay in Texas. But Melissa is no doormat – she conceives a child with Beard, against his objections, and shows us she has no intention of letting him be poached by another woman. She’s terrific, and if she’s a little over-idealised, well, so what? To all intents and purposes she’s absolutely real, like all of McEwan’s cast of characters, and we want things to turn out well for her – even as we do for two-timing, selfish, fraudulent Beard, whose gross imperfections are only really a minor distortion of flaws we can all recognise in ourselves. Humanity, heal thyself.