Heard him interviewed on Sci Friday. He is a novelist that likes science - doesn't describe himself as a science fiction writer.

This novel failed the 50-page test. I am really interested in global climate change so I persevered to page 75 before closing the covers. The initial twenty pages grapple with the main character's five failed marriages. Then the author develops the main character as a washed-out, bumbling, and distracted person in such an overdrawn way that it slips from humour into pathos. This novel should be consigned to the Beard-Einstein Conflation.

Disappointing story with unpleasant people. Sorry I spent the time to finish it. Well-written but what's the point?

An good novel about the last person you would want to meet. It was difficult at times to separate fact from fiction on the descriptions of global warming and the solutions but these were central to the book and for the most part seemed to be true statements. I have enjoyed other books by this author and was not disappointed with this one.

It's not every day that one's favourite author releases a new novel so, needless to say, I was psyched to read Ian McEwan's Solar. Once again, McEwan shows why he's one of the best writers in Britain if not in the whole world: his work is sharp-edged, argumentative (but not polemic), startling, hilarious and profane. Solar's protagonist, Michael Beard, is a repellent, fat and aging physicist who lives off the fame of his Nobel Prize from the 1970s. Egotistical at best and adulterous, bigoted and alcoholic at worst, Beard has been through five wives and continues to covet everything in sight: women, food, gossip and credit for the work of others. From an expedition to the Arctic Circle to the blazing heat of New Mexico to an incident over salt and vinegar crisps on a London train, Solar presents a brilliant juxtaposition of the "right" thing to do against the selfish but naturally "human" reaction. Though I can admit that McEwan's style isn't for everyone, I certainly never tire of it.

I think McEwan’s meticulous style sets up the irony perfectly. It is extraordinarily funny when someone who is considered smart (Nobel physicist) does something incredibly stupid (pee outside in the Arctic). The book is one facepalm moment after another, but the idiot sometimes wins.

My third attempt at reading this author and each time I'm barely able to get 1/3 of the way thru. Too wordy for me.

A good read, with a good dose of wit and satire. As someone, that is close in age to Beard, I found it a good reflection, on ones own life, and what measure of life you impart on the world.

This is an hysterically funny book. However, a lot of the quantum physics material is over my head which didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book. It leaves one with a mysterious questiion, however. As an epilogue McEwan thanks someone for digging up the original Nobel Prize speech accompanying the reward to his anti-hero. Is this just to tittilate the reader? We have read the whole book knowing with absolute certainty that the hero is absolutely fictitious (or a compilation of many individuals' serious flaws}.

It's no coincidence that the epigraph of Solar is a quote from John Updike's Rabbit, Run. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard, the prickly, almost completely unlikable protagonist of Ian McEwan's latest novel shares the heedless primal energies - and rationalizations for the consequences of those energies - with many of Updike's retrograde central characters. McEwan attaches this repellent character to the themes of climate change debate and the commoditization of green technologies, and that seems troubling at first. But soldiering through that initially offputting impression, I soon realized that climate change was just one of several sacred cows bulldozed by probably the most cartoonish characters and careening plotline (with a manic quality reminiscent of Don DeLillo's White Noise) McEwan has ever essayed. And that's saying a lot. And that's actually, for the most part, a compliment. While skewering climate change and environmental discourse through Beard's blatant opportunism and indifferent scholarship, McEwan also manages to trample everything from marriage to criminal investigations to healthy eating along the way, in rollicking and entertaining fashion. I couldn't take any of it too seriously because I wasn't sure McEwan was taking it too seriously himself. I get it, I get it - we have to take a huge grain of salt with the sanctimony of any noble crusade and those espousing same, and climate change is perhaps just as ripe for questioning and comeuppance as anything else. After I've been entertained by this book, I didn't feel there was any longer term message I was supposed to take away other than "wait and see what Ian McEwan will do next." This book is not going to haunt me the way "The Child in Time" or "Enduring Love" did, and it's not going to get under my skin the way the somewhat ponderous "Atonement" and the deeply flawed "On Chesil Beach" did. But it was twisted fun while it lasted.