Author's forthcoming novel, Solar, is about a scientist working on a technology to address global warmingThe novelist Ian McEwan changed the finished manuscript of his new book about a scientist working on a technology to address global warming to reflect the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, he said today.McEwan told the Guardian he watched the outcome of the Copenhagen summit in December "very closely and with some despair" and then went back to his novel, Solar, to rewrite a section a few pages from the end.The end of the book is set in summer 2009, and McEwan introduced a scene in which Michael Beard, the chief protaganist and a Nobel-prize winning physicist, recieves an email that invites him to address a meeting of foreign ministers at the coming summit. "I just slipped something in to reflect the spirit of sadness," he said. "Everything has collapsed around him [Beard] and he knows that Copenhagen will be just the place for him. It is where he would be heading to add his confusion to everybody else's."Had the summit produced a successful deal, as McEwen wanted, Beard and his failures would not have fitted in. "I would not have wanted my man anywhere near it," said the author. "I didn't want him there, believe me."McEwan said he had spent four years gathering material for the book, though he had wanted to write about climate change since the mid 1990s. "I couldn't see a way in. A subject so weighted with moral and political value is not helpful to a novel. I couldn't see a way of making it come alive."That changed during a visit of artists and scientists to the
Arctic in 2005, when he said he was s
truck by the contrast between the idealistic evening discussions about global warming and the chaos of the equipment room.In an interview in tomorrow's Guardian Review section, he says: "Clothes and equipment there to save our lives, which we should have been able to look after very easily would go missing, and I thought, for all the fine ...
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