Ian McEwan

There are still relatively few novels about climate change. The subject easily sinks under too much political engagement, too many statistics, or an overload of technical detail, so it takes a truly exceptional writer to turn it into compelling literature. Someone like Ian McEwan, for example. In his new novel Solar, he takes on the issue because he also recognized the opportunities the subject offers: “Climate change is a social construct, with scepticism and alarmism all boiling around together, and I was very interested in this.”

The climate debate also attracts a curious mix of people, ranging from superior idealists and weighty scientists to fast-talking opportunists who smell money. In other words, perfect material for satire — which is precisely the angle McEwan chose for Solar. Through the adventures of physicist and Nobel Prize winner Michael Beard, perhaps the strangest figure of them all, McEwan guides his readers through the world of climate hysteria. The novel promptly earned him the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

With that award, McEwan added one of the few literary prizes still missing from his mantelpiece. Earlier, he had already won the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Atonement. The latter was also adapted into a highly successful film, as was one of his earliest novels, The Cement Garden. His final novel before Solar was the acclaimed On Chesil Beach, soon to be adapted for the screen by Sam Mendes, director of American Beauty and Revolutionary Road.

During BorderKitchen, Ian McEwan will be interviewed by Hans Bouman (de Volkskrant). It will be McEwan’s only public appearance surrounding the publication of the Dutch edition of Solar.

Location: Koorenhuis, Prinsegracht 27, The Hague. Start time: 8:00 PM.