Alpha and Omega

Rs 550

Word had been about that Ian McEwan’s new book would be about climate change. It promised,in a way,a return to form of his last “big-theme” book,Saturday,published in 2005 and in its entirety is a February 2003 day in the life of a London-based neurosurgeon when the city is taken over by protests against the impending invasion of Iraq,every bit of it observed with a moral clarity that is chilling.

Yet those familiar with his work know that to second-guess how a McEwan book will go is an exercise fraught with hazard. In a career that can be neatly divided as before EL and after — to denote his shift as a novelist with his sixth novel,Enduring Love (1997) — McEwan has not only outranked his British peers,clubby stylists like Martin Amis and Julian Barnes,as the leading novelist of his generation,but has also asserted his capacity to surprise,to spring something new with each of the four novels that followed Enduring Love.

So,how could it be any different with Solar,his fifth after EL? Solar is so different from Saturday,that after chuckling through its surprisingly persistent comic set pieces,you have to wonder,did McEwan consciously decide to see through his new novel with an antihero,a man of science who is everything Saturday’s neurosurgeon is not?

It would appear so. Michael Beard,53 and flailing through a failing fifth marriage when the novel opens in 2000,is manipulative,petty and deceptive to a degree extraordinary for any human being,let alone somebody in possession of a Nobel prize for furthering Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect. That one-shot brilliance early in life leads to a hyphenation (the Beard-Einstein Conflation) that gives traction to his subsequent,lifelong quest to accrue well-paid affiliations to government and academic institutions and to retain the kind of arrogance needed to wilfully refuse fidelity in personal and professional relationships. Beard has the Nobel. So,he makes clear through his interior dialogue,he needs to be answerable to no one for his personal misdemeanours.

In a linear narrative divided into three parts — 2000,2005 and 2009,with the Copenhagen climate change summit approaching — it also becomes clear that Beard is a man perverted by his inability to keep up with the science built on his work. This gnaws at his self-respect,because as a man of quantum mechanics,he knows what it means to be alienated from the simple,elegant equation. It is a measure of McEwan’s diligence in researching the science and then,with a light touch,letting it make a parallel personal point: that this incapacity is reflected in the flabbiness of Beard’s personal and physical life.

McEwan,however,takes this one step all too predictably forward. For,wouldn’t you know that Beard’s predicament is simply that of us earthlings as a collective? He knows he has to streamline his life,his affairs and his gluttonous diet for all to be better,if not altogether well. But he cannot manage the transition wholesale,nor can he make the small incremental change to start it off. The comparison is so simplistic that it can make you cringe.

But McEwan is having too much fun to let this comparison remain dominant. Beard is drawn into the gathering anxiety over climate change when he is invited to the Arctic Circle to witness signs of global warming firsthand,and in the unruly company of artists. The chaos in the boot room,with no one able to mind his snow gear and no one hesitant to use another’s,presumably reflects the inability of global leaders to sort out each other at climate change summits. For Beard,the main upshot is that the experience stiffens his intuition for the right opportunity to be part of the climate change food chain — and makes tremendous progress by suggesting a way to get over mankind’s petroleum and coal addiction by harnessing energy by artificial photosynthesis. It is not a spoiler to add that this innovation is not his,as he will claim it to be.

No good should come to such a man,should it? McEwan has his own ideas,and he ends the story quite stunningly. It’s interesting how he does so because in Solar,that sense in his earlier novels of being watched,of a gathering menace that in one stroke could make the lives of his characters come apart,is absent. It is remarkable how McEwan succeeds in using his grotesque central character to make larger points for the global common good. But it is equally and sadly the case that the reader may still feel short-changed.

Point Omega

8.60 pounds

Sanjay Sipahimalani

In Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007),a character watches a performance artist suspend himself from various locations in Manhattan,mirroring the reality captured in a photograph of a man falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11. Art plays a role in DeLillo’s new work,too,this time as an installation that doesn’t reflect reality but a version of art itself. This is an exhibit,24 Hour Psycho,that was installed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2006: an actual conceptual piece by Douglas Gordon showing the Hitchcock film in slow motion,taking 24 hours to screen. It is,in DeLillo’s words,“the strange,bright fact that breathes and eats out there,the thing that’s not the movies”.

Scenes of characters watching this exhibit bracket the slender Point Omega which,like DeLillo’s last few novels,is written in a condensed,elliptical style. It is,however,carefully and intriguingly structured,almost in an answers-first-questions-later manner.

The plot begins with Jim Finley,a young filmmaker,travelling to a California desert to meet the 73-year-old Richard Elster. The latter was formerly employed by the Pentagon to conceptualise their Iraq war efforts and provide intellectual ballast to their martial leanings. Finley wants to persuade Elster to participate in a proposed film project,but ends up staying on for days,listening to Elster’s theories on matter and mind. Waters are muddied when the passive Jessica,Elster’s daughter,joins them. A sudden disappearance follows,throwing equations off-kilter.

Elster has retreated from the chaos of cities and is fond of gnomic utterances such as “matter wants to lose its self-consciousness”. The omega point of the title,a concept that occupies most of his waking hours,refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the acme of awareness towards which the universe is progressing. In Elster’s words,“Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.” All of this doesn’t exactly make for light bedside reading. Some of it reminds one of the brooding landscapes of Cormac McCarthy; at other times,there is Pinteresque menace. What DeLillo is trying to do is contrast “man’s grand themes” with “local grief,one body” — and to make the whole palatable. There’s a long,studied build-up,after which the mechanics of the plot kick in. This imparts to Point Omega a strange unity,half in slow motion,the other in normal speed.

Though the characters often come across as mouthpieces and the book’s gravitas veers close to self-importance,the austere Point Omega does possess a compelling incantatory rhythm.