'Solar' by Ian McEwan.

Michael Beard is a scientist who wrote a paper, the Beard-Einstein Conflation, which got him invited to Stockholm. Trouble is he’s also a greedy self-centered pig who gets his kicks by having affairs. After 20 years of living off a fluke Nobel Prize he isn’t sure if he believes in climate change or not or even if it matters. He likes the stipends and research grants though. Divorce is expensive.

His fifth wife, Patrice is having an affair with a common builder, Tarpin, who lives in a mock-Tudor semi. She is doing it mainly to annoy Michael, or so he thinks, and there is an irritating young scientist called Tom Aldous who wears a ponytail and a piece of coloured string on his wrist. Tom genuinely wants to save the planet. Michael wishes he’d shut up. In fact the bulk of the book involves digressions on urban sprawl, feminism, political correctness, physics and the best way to eat crisps on a train journey. McEwan writes with great precision and some sentences are well worth reading twice.

About halfway through some action is needed. Michael goes to Spitzbergen. He comes back to find Tom enjoying a shower in his house and leaving wet footprints everywhere. Then Tom, who has also been having it off with Patrice, slips on a rug, bangs his head and dies. Michael gets the death blamed on the builder lover, Tarpin, who is found guilty of murder. Michael makes good use of Tom’s theories on photosynthesis by establishing a next generation solar panel array in New Mexico.

The book is quite funny in places but it stops well short of hilarity. McEwan has a dry, almost deadpan, sense of humour but Michael is more tragic than comic. Humanity’s need for energy is a serious matter. Global warming is a hot topic in more ways than one and McEwan tackles all the arguments, for and against. McEwan gets a lot of stuff off his chest in this novel.

It isn’t clear how Michael got the way he is - a stern father, and a doting mother, don’t make him exceptional. He’s weak-willed when it comes to food and sex but he’s no fool. He knows his way around patent law but his personal life is a mess. He does get twinges of remorse, and he has considerable self-knowledge. He knows he’d make a lousy father for instance and he also knows he isn’t as self-sufficient as he would like to be. In some ways he’s a fairly typical human being. The moral? His own self-interest is his undoing.

Nothing is resolved. The book ends as Michael’s past catches up with him and he disappears under an avalanche of loose ends.