“It’s a catastrophe,” he says. “Relax!”
If only they could. In the final stretch, lawyers, two of Beard’s lovers and one angry ex-con — not to mention his own porcine body — look poised to catch up with the Nobelist as he gathers investors and journalists to watch him electrify a small town in New Mexico with his artificial photosynthesis plant.
The novel is partly a love letter to science, and McEwan refers to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and “coincident M2-branes.” Even a highway runs “straight as a Euclidean line.”
Yet Beard’s orb-shaped body tells the story of our polluted planet more vividly than any amount of well-explained physics. Though the scientist’s mind may hold the answer to our predicament, his flabby flesh embodies what we really need to overcome: our own natures.
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