Suzanne McDonald, University of Queensland

Ian McEwan’s new novel Solar contains a character so deplorable that his genes must all be, as Richard Dawkins’ says, selfish. Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist, who furthered Einstein’s law of the photoelectric effect to create the Beard-Einstein Conflation. The wealth and fame that goes hand-in-hand with his Nobel Prize allows Beard to grow content: he moves through four wives, devours frequent first-class meals, and graces the headers of numerous institutional letterheads. It has been two decades since Beard did any real research. His health is also rapidly failing. His obesity causes him dizzy spells, hot-flushes, and nausea, and the appearance of a “reddish-brown blotch, a map of unknown territory” on his wrist is confirmed as a melanoma. Yet he does nothing about any of this, constantly consuming, witnessing the effects of his consumption and still doing nothing.

Dawkins, drawing on Darwin’s evolutionary theory, suggests that human genes are inherently selfish rather than altruistic. McEwan challenges the notion that selfishness promotes self-preservation in Beard’s extreme egotism. Beard’s immoral self-indulgence does not preserve him but brings about his own death. He can only function in the present, unable to even see, or care about, his own future. McEwan’s use of such an abhorrent character is satirical because essentially Beard represents us, not only in the climate change debate, but also in life in general. This paper will argue that by using Michael Beard as a metaphor McEwan suggests that, “much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense”.