Wordsworth, Anybody?

"When I interviewed McEwan about his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach, we talked of the problems that beset literature with any upfront “green” agenda. First, the trap of propaganda: “Fiction hates preachiness? Nor do readers much like to be hectored,” McEwan warned. Equally unpromising is a too-familiar dystopian tradition that thrills readers with flesh-creeping disaster scenarios of flood or fire: “We’ve had so many dystopias that we’re brain-dead in that direction”. However, McEwan did hold out some hope for climate-change fiction that would offer “something small and fierce? Maybe it needs an Animal Farm. Maybe it needs allegory. But if you’re going in that direction, you need a lot of wit.” McEwan did go in that direction, and has duly come up with a comic solution. His new novel Solar, due in March, will depict the misadventures of a burnt-out physicist, Michael Beard, who in the midst of mid-life mess stumbles on a clean-energy technology that might just save the planet. It will feature eco-emergency not as the didactic centrepiece but more of a “background hum”. "

Taken from:

A tide of green ink.