SOLAR by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape 2010)

"The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution."

I have read all McEwan's fiction work to date and this, for me, is the best yet. The optimum McEwan, where densely textured Proustian slabs of prose read easily and quickly and compulsively like the finest two-way filter with artful baffle-resistors. A page-turner with bite and constructive intractability.

Serial maritalisms. The coincidence of accidental or purposeful death. This is Updike's Rabbit now with actual body angiograms of prose, and eating-at-you words - but even more enveloping, moving through the twenty-first century, Bush and Blair, MPs' Expenses, Global Warming...

The Conflation of good and bad intentions. The primacy of scientific discovery, and whose pecking-order of credit you choose to join.

And matters concerning wind turbines, like those I've been watching grow like sea-trees from the very window where I write this.

A bag of crisps on a train and an icy urination, just two of this book's mementos to start calving glaciers to enter my bloodstream.

And the Icelandic Ash Cloud - one can imagine McEwan himself or McEwan's protagonist experiencing it and becoming conflated within this wonderful novel. Just an imaginary epilogue that has nothing to do with Global Warming? Or this novel?

ALL MY REVIEWS: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/df-lewis-real-time-reviews/