Sunlight and Dark: Humorous Shades in Ian Mcewan's Later Novels

73 PETER CHILDS Sunlight and Dark: Humorous Shades in Ian McEwan's Later Novels Ian McEwan's debut stories were noted for their mordant tone and Kafkaesque use of violence, fantasy and sexuality. While black comedy marked the early stories and novellas, his writing adopted a more serious register as it developed over the 1980s and 1990s up to the Booker-prize winning Amsterdam, his first extended foray into satire. Amsterdam was followed by three serious fictions, Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach, in what has been considered McEwan's mature writing style, noted for its lyrical, cursive sentences. However, in his recent novels, Solar and Sweet Tooth, McEwan has approached serious subject matter, ecology and espionage, in an archly ironic mode. This essay will characterize the style of McEwan's latest writing while speculating on the historical reasons for his present concatenation of humour and politics in a comic vein. Ian McEwan's novel Solar won the Wodehouse prize for the best comic novel of the year in 2010.1 Yet McEwan would prefer to say that Solar contains humorous sections rather than that it is a comic novel. He concedes that the book has extended stretches aimed in part to amuse, but evidently dislikes the generic categorization: "I hate comic novels; it's like being wrestled to the ground and being tickled, being forced to laugh" (Soal 2008). This suggests if anything that Solar is closer to the approach of Waugh than of Wodehouse, with shades of other non-British writers from Kafka to Kundera, Nabokov to Updike, but it raises the question of the capaciousness as well as the category of the comic novel, which might include such diverse anglo- phone works as Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Catch-22, Ulysses, The Pickwick Pa- pers, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lucky Jim, Murphy, Cold Comfort Farm, Under the Net, London Fields, and the novels included in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. If the designation of comic fiction in part derives from the oeuvre associated with the author then there are comic writers, varying in style from Voltaire or Rabelais to Kingsley Amis or Flann O'Brien, and there are novels with sections that may draw laughter by writers who, like McEwan, are not comic novelists but whose fiction has humorous elements, tragicomic standpoints, sardonic set pieces, or comedic ingredients. The dominant style of the comic novel of the 20th century appears of a largely dif- ferent kind from the characteristic mode of the 18th century in Britain, which coincid- ed with a heyday of satire and wit, in writers such as Smollett, Sterne, Johnson, Bur- ney and Swift. Arguably, over the course of the 19th century in-between, and despite the popularity of Dickens, the tone of comedy shifted with more serious but heavily ironical works, such as those of Jane Austen, which have been seen as less theatrical and more novelistic, by which perhaps it is meant more concerned with interiority and the subtleties of human personal and social frailty, as prevalent in 20th-century ap- proaches to humour.2 As for the 21st century, Jonathan Coe suggests the comic novel is on life-support as the world has turned serious post-9/11 (Coe 2013), but he is also aware that writers like Howard Jacobson, Will Self, Zadie Smith and Coe himself are 1 Its full title is the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize. 2 See the discussion in the Introduction to The Irresponsible Self (Wood 2004). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 27.1 (March 2016): 73-83. Anglistik, Jahrgang 27 (2016), Ausgabe 1 © 2016 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 74 PETER CHILDS keeping the genre alive alongside the varied satirical brio of the likes of Rushdie, Barnes, and Amis. Indeed if one adds the output of Celtic novelists such as Irvine Welsh, or Iain Banks and Niall Griffiths, or the wry, sometimes dour, Spark-inspired humour of writers like A.L. Kennedy, or the gothic Stevensonian satire of Alasdair Gray, or even the English eccentricity of Magnus Mills, it is arguable that comedy, if not the comic novel, has in fact been flourishing, especially away from London. It seems Ian McEwan has not been interested in the label of the comic novel ap- plied to his fiction, though the Booker-prize winning Amsterdam was considered a satire by many, and he has now won a Wodehouse award for a novel set against the 21st-century crisis of climate change. In this essay, I will seek to discuss the ways in which McEwan uses elements of character and plot from the conventions of comedy, and then consider the kind of comic fiction Solar might be said to be. Solar is a novel without commitment. It paints a tragicomic portrait of human na- ture, depicting the short-term promotion of individual interests and rewards against the collective need for social and ecological care to ensure the well-being in the future of individuals and species. It is not concerned with the rapacious pursuit of greed and power but the rather more quotidian paths of lazy least-resistance and easy quick-wins to achieve creature comfort and selfish benefit. A central theme is irresponsibility, embodied in the central figure of theoretical physicist Michael Beard, head of the National Centre for Renewable Energy near Reading in England. A Nobel-prize win- Winter Journals ning scientist resting on his laurels, Beard believes "physics was free of human taint, it described a world that would still exist if men and women and all their sorrows did not" (McEwan 2010, 9). In some ways a 21st-century heir to John Self from Martin Amis's 1984 novel Money, Beard is similarly a caricature of his times; Solar strives to express the concerns of the age but has at its centre a transatlantic representative of callous indifference to the social good. Beard is exploitative while largely lacking in for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution enthusiasm or pleasure. He is described on the first page of the novel as anhedonic (3), and even the motorway out of London along which he travels "demonstrated a passion for existence which he could no longer match" (26). At the turn of the millennium, Beard is middle-aged and dissipated, without insight or vision but at the helm of one of science's attempts to mitigate humanity's exploitationPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) of the earth. At the bidding of politicians, he has invested the efforts of his Centre in micro wind-power machines that ordinary citizens can understand and purchase. However, one of his young postdoctoral researchers, Tom Aldous, proposes a grand scheme that Beard initially thinks is impractical: "Solar arrays on a tiny fraction of the world's deserts would give us all the power we need" (27). The novel's comic thrust derives from the reasons why and the ways in which this idea, positioned in the narrative as a potential partial solution to the threat of climate change, fails spectacularly in practice because of the "human taint," mentioned above. The book is arranged in three parts, set in 2000, 2005 and 2009 respectively. At the start of the narrative Beard is 53 years old, long past his glory days, and clinging to his fifth marriage to 34-year-old Monroe-lookalike Patrice (7).3 As the story opens, Patrice has learned of Beard's latest infidelity and decided to begin an affair of her own with their builder Rodney Tarpin. When Beard returns from a climate change expedition to the Arctic he finds that Patrice has also slept with Aldous, whose sudden accidental death when he and Beard are alone in the house leaves Beard with the 3 This may be an allusion to the Terry Johnson play Insignificance and its 1985 film adaptation by Nicolas Roeg, in which The Professor, based on Einstein, talks about relativity with The Actress, based on Monroe. Anglistik, Jahrgang 27 (2016), Ausgabe 1 © 2016 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) HUMOROUS SHADES IN IAN MCEWAN'S LATER NOVELS 75 young man's innovative research into artificial photosynthesis. Putting his rationalism to work, Beard calculatedly frames Tarpin for the death. If there is comedy here, it is very much in terms of the Falstaffian irresponsibility striating Beard's behaviour, which rests on a combination of self-delusion and short-sightedness. All is confusion and chance, rationalization rather than reason, opportunity rather than organization, farcical rather than jovial. McEwan explains the appeal of such an approach: "I like the cognitive moment of dissonance when people are so persuaded by something they want to believe that they see or hear differently [...] We're almost defined as a species by our willingness to misunderstand" (Sandall 2008, 6-7).4 In this spirit the narrative continues, as unplanned courses of action spiral out of control and lead to catastrophic ends that can seem humorous to the reader, in the spirit of Chaplin's view that "Com- edy is life viewed from a distance; tragedy, life in a close-up" (qtd. in Levin 1987, 9). Or, in other words, McEwan's chosen mode for the novel matches responses to climate change, which people view from a distance rather than close-up, and so do not take sufficiently seriously in terms of their responsibility. Part One of the novel is set at the turn of the millennium, in the year when "the earth's fate hung in the balance, and Bush snatched victory from Gore to preside over the tragedy of eight wasted years" (McEwan 2010, 218).

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