In the last decade, Ian McEwan’s novels have been depressingly artful. His last two books — Saturday and On Chesil Beach — have been particularly airless. Describing the condition of human happiness, his sensibility became finicky, tricked out, contrived. The books seemed too readable, as if the author had untangled his people in his head, flattened them on paper and then calmly filled them with the smooth helium of his prose.

Solar is happily different. It returns us to McEwan’s conventional pleasures of narrative, of English narrative — a straight tale that hugs the mind of the central character, told with dry humour, forever on a rim of irony. Meet Michael Beard, 55-year-old Nobel-laureate physicist who’s coasted on his eminence for 20 years. He retains the monomania of a rationalist, is against religion and sceptical of climate change. The book opens with his crumbling fifth marriage (he’s a habitual adulterer) and his sett ing up of a new institute for clean energy. We witness Beard’s personal and professional turbulences — divorce, philandering, a girlfriend demanding marriage, unwanted pregnancy, another girlfriend demanding marriage; a colleague’s death, Beard’s emergence as a climate change convert and profiteer, his media scandals, setting up an American site in the grand quest to replicate photosynthesis, and all his ineptness in between. We meet Beard in 2000, then skip to 2005, and finally to 2009 when all his circumstances finally crunch up on him.

This is novel writing as heroic set pieces. The book’s pitch-perfect scenes and cleaned-flute prose provide ready satisfactions for any reader. We visit the British country, the Arctic, the American south, airports, trains, hotel bars, dance shops — each sketched with delectable realism. McEwan is as clinical and unforgiving as ever, always quick to take the shine off a situation — in the Arctic, Beard quickly suffers a man’s ultimate accident in his iced groin (“his heartbeat seemed to have migrated down there”). And McEwan is nothing if not accomplished — he’s got the science down pat, is properly restrained in explaining it, and aptly skewers its inhabitants.

McEwan is pitiless, of course, he’s done his homework, of course, and provides us the modern panic of urban existence that grips us all sooner or later. No bungle, fumble, miscue or calamity is omitted.

In the last decade, Ian McEwan’s novels have been depressingly artful. His last two books — Saturday and On Chesil Beach — have been particularly airless. Describing the condition of human happiness, his sensibility became finicky, tricked out, contrived. The books seemed too readable, as if the author had untangled his people in his head, flattened them on paper and then calmly filled them with the smooth helium of his prose.

Solar is happily different. It returns us to McEwan’s conventional pleasures of narrative, of English narrative — a straight tale that hugs the mind of the central character, told with dry humour, forever on a rim of irony. Meet Michael Beard, 55-year-old Nobel-laureate physicist who’s coasted on his eminence for 20 years. He retains the monomania of a rationalist, is against religion and sceptical of climate change. The book opens with his crumbling fifth marriage (he’s a habitual adulterer) and his sett ing up of a new institute for clean energy. We witness Beard’s personal and professional turbulences — divorce, philandering, a girlfriend demanding marriage, unwanted pregnancy, another girlfriend demanding marriage; a colleague’s death, Beard’s emergence as a climate change convert and profiteer, his media scandals, setting up an American site in the grand quest to replicate photosynthesis, and all his ineptness in between. We meet Beard in 2000, then skip to 2005, and finally to 2009 when all his circumstances finally crunch up on him.

This is novel writing as heroic set pieces. The book’s pitch-perfect scenes and cleaned-flute prose provide ready satisfactions for any reader. We visit the British country, the Arctic, the American south, airports, trains, hotel bars, dance shops — each sketched with delectable realism. McEwan is as clinical and unforgiving as ever, always quick to take the shine off a situation — in the Arctic, Beard quickly suffers a man’s ultimate accident in his iced groin (“his heartbeat seemed to have migrated down there”). And McEwan is nothing if not accomplished — he’s got the science down pat, is properly restrained in explaining it, and aptly skewers its inhabitants.

McEwan is pitiless, of course, he’s done his homework, of course, and provides us the modern panic of urban existence that grips us all sooner or later. No bungle, fumble, miscue or calamity is omitted.

Beard cheats on his wife and his colleagues, frames someone for murder, neglects his partners and daughter. In a superbly comic midsection, he gets roasted by the media for a politically incorrect utterance. McEwan satirises postmodernism — how ‘relativity’ has sneaked out of science to create havoc in the social sciences. The comedy steadily increases in pitch till we’re almost at Bellovian levels — more than anyone, Beard reminded me of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, without the interiority but tangled in similarly preposterous sexual and professional excitements.

Here’s a hint of what’s new — the exquisite pain of conversations in McEwan’s earlier books has been socialised in Beard — he’s secure in his self-esteem, and brackets difficult conversations with fatty foods. The British man has been Americanised. His bumbling knowingness has turned into a willed, searing innocence. Beard faces all the epiphanies and drama of his life, takes the buzz of potato chips, fellatio and the Arctic cold alike, with a reliable assurance of his good naturedness, his reasonableness.

With this light-hearted masterpiece of cosmopolitan follies, McEwan can be justified again as Britain’s national novelist — curious savant, earnest activist, ironic storyteller, flawless writer-technician — all in all, a lovely pedant.