An Air-conditioned Global Warming: The Description of Settings in Ian McEwan’s Solar

Abstract

The three main settings of McEwan’s Solar, a novel described as “the first great global-warming novel” (Walsh 2010) are significant: from London, to the Artic Pole, up to the desert in New Mexico, these places are all described through the interior monologue of the anti-hero Michael Beard, a character allegorical of humanity’s greed for selfish over-consumption. As Beard moves in the real environment only through the non-places of supermodernity (Augé), the paper analyses the descriptions of settings to underline how McEwan uses them to write about climatechange in a new “novelistic” way (McEwan).