Ian McEwan

Michael Beard was awarded the Nobel Prize when he was barely in his twenties. He himself cannot fathom the reasons for such a prestigious accolade (perhaps the committee confused him with Sir Michael Bird?), but ever since, > like a castaway, he had clung to this solitary plank, seeing himself as a privileged being . The novel has little to do with science and solar energy; rather, it primarily recounts the tale of a wretched man—lying, selfish, opportunistic—who moves through the affections of those closest to him with sheer indifference. The narrative opens at the moment of Michael’s separation from his fifth wife, who is cheating on him in retaliation for her husband’s numerous infidelities. Michael heads a government research centre tasked with finding solutions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and thereby combat climate change. In reality, our protagonist does not believe in the catastrophic effects of atmospheric pollution in the slightest; yet, with the very same flippancy that governs his love life, he endorses an absurd project to install small wind turbines on every British home. The brainchild of a young researcher, a renewable energy fanatic, who irritates the cynical Michael with his environmentalist idealism. Returning from an expedition to the Antarctic continent—where he was compelled to take part in an eccentric research party studying melting ice caps—Michael catches the young researcher in his home: he is one of his wife’s lovers. During the exchange that follows the discovery, the young researcher kills himself, tripping over a rug as he rushes toward Michael to beg not to be sacked. Our protagonist is entirely innocent, yet he realises he might be the prime suspect. And so he orchestrates the wrongful conviction of another of his wife’s lovers, a violent and absurdly jealous man. To this first deceit, another is soon added: Michael comes into possession of the young researcher’s papers, which demonstrate the feasibility of extracting hydrogen from water using solar energy. It is the breakthrough of the century, poised to resolve at a single stroke both carbon emissions and the depletion of energy reserves. The narrative then leaps forward many years. Michael—now an obese man, an insatiable gourmand and drinker—has persisted in his cynical, superficial existence. In his private life, alongside casual mistresses, he finds himself burdened with two ongoing relationships: one with an Englishwoman, who bore him a daughter despite his fierce resistance, and another with an American, whom he met in New Mexico where he is overseeing the prototype plant for extracting hydrogen from water, critical to proving the industrial viability of the concept. On the business front, he must contend with investors who are often sceptical of the venture, questioning above all whether it is worth sinking money into such unproven technology when an environmental catastrophe is not even guaranteed—meaning fossil fuels (such as coal, oil, and the like) might not actually need to be abandoned. Confronted by the anxieties of his partner, who has invested several million dollars and cites the opinions of numerous experts denying global warming, Beard, bolstered by his Nobel status, > placed a hand on his friend’s arm, a clear sign that he was overstepping his mark. Toby, listen, the catastrophe is coming . He, who had never believed in global warming! Yet, unlike the theory that earned him the Nobel Prize—which untangles the intricate interplay between energy and mass with mathematical precision—Michael remains ensnared in the tangle of falsehoods and contradictions that define his life. Just as he is on the verge of proving his sheer genius (though is this what truly drives him, or does only momentary gratification matter?), his "women" call him to account for his hollow promises, the wrongly convicted man returns seeking vengeance, and a lawsuit is brought against him for intellectual theft. He realises he has failed, while keenly feeling the cancer that is killing him. Finally conscious of his own wretchedness, he sees his daughter, who loves him unconditionally, running toward him, but > he doubted, as he held her, that anyone would ever believe him now that it was true love . The prose is brilliant, the plot unfolds engagingly in parts, and the characters are sharply drawn: all elements that ought to captivate the reader. Yet, much like the novel’s protagonist, there is a certain flippancy and an excess of irony that renders the narrative evanescent. Everything feels paradoxical; consequently, deceit and cynicism—the core themes of the tale and such emblematic traits of our age—remain addressed only superficially, failing to deliver the revelatory weight one would expect. McEwan is a major author squandering his craft. Why read it? It is exquisitely written, and the premise is compelling.

Like much of McEwan’s fiction, we are confronted at the outset with an extraordinary event (in this case, the death of a person falling from a hot-air balloon) that brings profound upheaval to a life that seemed quiet and settled: the couple’s relationship enters a crisis, an undercurrent of paranoia and instability emerges within the protagonist, and his professional choices are called into question. And up to a point, the novel follows this trajectory, with some truly fine and effective pages on the breakdown of the marital bond; it almost seems as though everything the protagonist endures (in particular, his harassment at the hands of a religious fanatic) were a figment of his imagination, the result of an increasingly pronounced depressive and paranoid spiral. The protagonist discovers himself to be different from who he thought he was. Then, just as the story seems to have reached an impasse, a happy ending emerges—almost worthy of a detective story—but along with it comes the reader’s disappointment. McEwan writes very well, in an English that is simple, fluid, and yet richly expressive: individual pages are remarkable, the whole somewhat less so.

Henry is a neurosurgeon living in London with his wife, a lawyer, and two children: his son, a musician, and his daughter, a poet temporarily living in Paris. He wakes up one Saturday morning, watches an airplane make an emergency landing from his window, and imagines it to be an act of terrorism. Thus begins Saturday, a day shaped both by broader events (television news reports on the impending war in Iraq, the anti-war pacifist march, the aftermath of the plane's emergency landing) and private occurrences (his relationship with his wife, a squash match with a friend, a visit to his mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, attending his son's gig, preparing dinner for his daughter’s return and the arrival of his father-in-law, himself an eminent poet). The narrative unfolds within this contrast between the catastrophism of the external world and the quest for domestic peace, for a serene existence beyond the external turbulence. This attempt fails, and a minor car accident is enough to let violence and the unforeseen burst into intimate, family life. To avoid the peace march, Henry commits a traffic violation and collides with a car carrying a group of thugs, who attempt to assault the surgeon. Henry nevertheless manages to extricate himself from a perilous situation by destabilizing the thugs' ringleader, named Baxter, recognizing that he suffers from a severe neurodegenerative disorder. Baxter vows revenge for the humiliation and breaks into Henry's home just as the family is celebrating the arrival of the daughter and the grandfather, the renowned poet. Baxter threatens Henry’s wife and orders the young woman to strip: amid extreme tension, she recites lines of poetry, which mollify Baxter; he abandons his violent intent and is subsequently pushed down the stairs by Henry and his son. The novel concludes with Henry’s decision to operate on Baxter, who was gravely injured, followed by a series of existential reflections on the surgeon’s part: > all he feels is fear. He is weak and ignorant, frightened of the unpredictable consequences of an action that has slipped out of control and is generating new events, new consequences, until you are led to a place where you never dreamed of being and would never have chosen, a knife to your throat . The book revolves around deeply philosophical themes: human helplessness in the face of an increasingly inexplicable world, the impact of catastrophism on everyday life, the pursuit of domestic serenity, the fragility of the barriers separating the outside world from intimacy, the burden of heredity and a life beyond our control, and the role of affective bonds. Yet the narrative's most compelling theme is the clash between scientific culture—which strives to impose order and rationality—and literary culture, poetry in particular, which interprets the world through frameworks irreducible to scientific reason and, perhaps for this very reason, succeeds in grasping the innermost meaning of things and resolving crises. It is the poem recited by his daughter that draws Baxter out of his madness, not Henry’s logical reasoning. What, then, is the way out of a situation that can no longer be comprehended through the tenets of scientific rationality? One finds oneself at an impasse, encapsulated by the words of the poet Matthew Arnold: > ah, love, let us be true to one another! For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new. Hath really neither joy, nor light, nor love, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night . The clash between desire (the love that makes us see the world as a land of dreams) and reality, which appears to us only as a bearer of death—is this contradiction not resolvable solely through a rational approach? The heavy philosophical content and the multiplicity of themes do not serve the narrative pace or the cohesion of the discourse. It is, as usual, very well written, yet at times it leans too heavily into intellectualism, and the characters remain flattened within assigned roles that conform more to stereotypes than to any genuine depth of character.

*Disguises*—in Italian, *travestimenti*—is a short story centered on the theme of disguise as an ambiguous game leading to the distortion of reality and of the self. Henry, a ten-year-old boy, is orphaned and goes to live with his aunt, a former actress. The boy is made to undergo an evening ritual in which the two dress up and perform the roles inherent to their assumed appearances. It is a game that turns unsettling when the aunt forces the boy to dress as a girl and, met with her nephew's resistance, displays an authoritarian and aggressive temperament. As was to be expected, the boy makes friends and meets a girl his own age who invites him to her house. Henry is no longer a child; he is becoming an adolescent, and his aunt's inclinations grow increasingly intolerable. The aunt throws a costume party, and the story culminates in a crescendo of illusions, masquerades, and scenes either real or merely imagined, at a gathering where it is difficult to tell who is doing what: > now it came back to him, if you are dressed as someone else pretending to be them, you take the blame for what they have done, or for what you do being them... or that you did? It is a muddled story, tangling together several themes: disguise as play, the forging of identity in adolescence, and a conception of reality as illusion—an impression created by one's own senses rather than an objectively existing world. There are too many psychological and philosophical motifs for the story to remain intelligible; it seems merely an occasion to experiment with new subjects and cement stylistic virtuosity. Why not read it? It is difficult to read, inconclusive, and weighed down with literary preciousness.