Books: Ian McEwan's 'Solar'

I've always had a soft spot for Ian McEwan, but I have to admit I've gone a bit cold on him in recent years as he's settled into the role of a state-of-the-nation writer, a sort of Novelist Laureate for the Blair-Brown generation.

My favourite writing by him is the darker, grimly humorous and macabre streak you saw in his early stuff--'The Cement Garden', with its wild children, the perverse stories of 'First Love, Last Rites', or even the fragmentary violence of 'Black Dogs'.

I think writers are generally least likely to find significance when they seek it out. While I'm reasonably interested in, say, what life was like for leftish British people on the fringes of the science world in the 1990s and 2000s (McEwan's now written three of those), I'm not so interested that I'd want to read 300 pages of it. Zola's 'Therese Raquin' gives me a picture of lower-middle class life in late 19th-century Paris, but I enjoy it because it's a great melodrama about jealousy and guilt, not for the historical detail.

To give the guy his dues, McEwan's novels are anything but dry historical documents. In fact, they're still full of violence and jealousy and regret and sexuality. I just wish he'd give in a little more to those tendencies.

He's a phenomenally talented writer, and 'Solar' is a pretty taut comedy centred on a philandering, obese Nobel-winning physicist whose outward celebrity as a developer of renewable energy technologies hides his inner corruption. This is a great comic character, full of evasions and procrastinations but capable of moments of brilliance that keep his many sins from catching up with him until the rather over-contrived denouement. McEwan writes several wonderful set pieces, and at times it is laugh-out-loud hilarious.

So why do I feel a bit disappointed? I suppose I like Ian McEwan best when he unsettles me; when I close the book with a shiver of unease that hangs around for a while afterwards. 'Solar' is the work of a supremely talented writer and in many ways it's flawless, but I ended it mostly with a vague feeling of admiration, as if to say: "So that's how he did it! Very clever."

I'd recommend it as a good read, but I don't want flawlessness from Ian McEwan. I want flaws! Big, interesting flaws: ones that catch unexpected reflections, and illuminate the world in surprising ways.