Solar

Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his early fifties who has done no original work in two decades, coasting on the reputation of his theoretical breakthrough, the Beard-Einstein Conflation. Short, overweight, and balding, he is nonetheless attractive to beautiful women; his four previous marriages all ended within six years. His fifth, to Patrice, is now collapsing: She has begun a flagrant affair with Rodney Tarpin, a heavyset builder. Beard finds himself paralyzed by shame and consumed by desire for the wife he is losing.

Beard serves as figurehead of a government research center near Reading dedicated to renewable energy, while a civil servant named Jock Braby handles the real administration. One postdoctoral physicist stands out: Tom Aldous, a goofy young man from Norfolk who advocates for artificial photosynthesis, the process of replicating how plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. Aldous believes the Beard-Einstein Conflation illuminates quantum coherence in photosynthesis, meaning the coordinated quantum behavior that enables efficient energy transfer. Beard finds Aldous tiresome.

Beard's domestic crisis deepens. One night he discovers Patrice with a black eye inflicted by Tarpin; when he confronts the builder, Tarpin slaps him across the face. Beard joins artists and scientists on a ship frozen into a fjord near Spitsbergen, an island in the Arctic, for a seminar on climate change. He endures a brutal snowmobile ride during which his penis freezes to his suit's metal zipper.

Returning to London earlier than expected, Beard discovers not Tarpin but Aldous sitting on his sofa in Beard's dressing gown, having spent the night with Patrice. Aldous tries to defuse the confrontation, arguing that the marriage is already over and pleading not to be fired. As Aldous runs toward Beard with arms outstretched, apparently to beg, he slips on a polar-bear-skin rug, flies into the air, and strikes his head on the corner of a glass coffee table, dying instantly.

Beard realizes the scene will make him the prime suspect. Without premeditation, he frames Tarpin: He dips a hammer from Tarpin's tool bag in Aldous's blood, plants Tarpin's hairs on it, and hides a bloodied tissue under the sofa. He establishes an alibi at the British Library. The evidence against Tarpin proves damning. At trial, Patrice testifies devastatingly, and the jury convicts in three hours. Tarpin receives a sixteen-year sentence.

After separating from Patrice, Beard reads a file Aldous had prepared for him and grasps the brilliance of Aldous's ideas: using nanotechnology to replicate photosynthesis, deploying light-sensitive dyes and catalysts to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. He makes notes on Aldous's pages, marking each with the previous year's date to support a future claim of independent authorship.

Part Two opens in 2005. Beard has transformed his life using Aldous's ideas. He runs an artificial-photosynthesis project at Imperial College, has started a company, acquired patents, and partnered with Toby Hammer, a wiry fixer in recovery from an alcohol addiction who navigates venture capital and government bureaucracies. They have secured a site near Lordsburg, New Mexico, and are building toward a prototype.

On the Heathrow Express, rushing to a speech at the Savoy, Beard opens what he believes is his bag of crisps and begins eating. A large young man opposite takes crisps from the same bag. Outraged, Beard seizes the man's water bottle and drains it. On the platform, he discovers his own unopened bag in his pocket: He had been eating the stranger's food the entire time.

At the Savoy, Beard delivers an impassioned speech arguing that solar energy represents both an urgent necessity and an investment opportunity. He uses a metaphor borrowed unacknowledged from Aldous, comparing humanity to a man dying of thirst who chops down trees for sap instead of drinking the rain, and tells the crisp anecdote as a parable about self-deception.

Around this time, Beard stumbles into a public scandal. As head of a government committee promoting physics education, he responds to a question about women in physics by citing research on cognitive differences between men and women. A committee member dramatically resigns in protest, and the tabloids brand Beard a "neo-Nazi" and expose his serial infidelities. Braby uses the scandal to force Beard's resignation from the Center.

Beard is also involved with Melissa Browne, a kind woman eighteen years his junior who owns dance-clothing shops in North London. Melissa tells him she is seven weeks pregnant, having deliberately stopped taking the Pill without his knowledge. She insists she will have the baby regardless. Beard is horrified but lacks the will to resist.

Part Three opens in 2009. Beard waits in an El Paso hotel bar for Hammer. A hotel clerk mentions that an Englishman named "something like Turnip" came looking for him the previous week. Beard recognizes this as Tarpin, released after serving eight years. A doctor confirms that a blotch on Beard's hand is a melanoma requiring immediate treatment, but Beard insists on attending the opening ceremony first.

Beard has been having an affair with Darlene, a good-hearted waitress who lives in a trailer in Lordsburg. He has not told her about Melissa or their three-year-old daughter, Catriona. At the Lordsburg site, preparations are under way for the opening of the LAPP (Lordsburg Artificial Photosynthesis Plant), with twenty-three solar panels gleaming in the sun. Beard receives an email from Patrice warning that Tarpin has gone to America looking for him.

Beard finds Tarpin sitting alone in the bleachers, diminished and gaunt. Tarpin claims he never killed Aldous and insists Patrice did it, using one of Tarpin's hammers while Aldous slept on her sofa. He says he promised Patrice he would take the blame and wrote her daily from prison for eight years without receiving a reply. Wanting a fresh start far from Patrice, he asks Beard for a job. Beard refuses, and Tarpin erupts in fury.

Hammer brings a lawyer named Barnard to Beard's motel room. Barnard reveals that the now-knighted Sir Jock Braby and the Center are filing a claim against Beard's patents, arguing they derive from Aldous's work. Expert physicists have concluded the patents are based on Aldous's ideas, and research shows Beard made no public mention of artificial photosynthesis before Aldous's death. Beard insists Aldous was merely his scribe and refuses to cancel the ceremony.

Everything collapses at once. Darlene reveals she has called Melissa, discovered Catriona, and told Melissa they are getting married. Melissa calls to say she and Catriona are driving to Lordsburg. Beard spots Tarpin getting into Barnard's car, drawing a finger across his throat. Hammer calls: Someone has taken a sledgehammer to all twenty-three panels, destroying the catalysts and electronics. Hammer says they owe millions, Braby will sue, and Aldous's father has persuaded authorities to pursue criminal charges. Hammer tells Beard to stay out of England.

In the final scene, Beard sits alone at the Blooberry Family Restaurant, contemplating the wreckage. Before he can eat, Melissa storms in, followed by Darlene, both women furious. Ahead of them runs Catriona, carrying her koala-bear backpack, calling out to her father. As Beard rises and opens his arms to greet his daughter, he feels an unfamiliar swelling sensation in his heart but doubts that anyone would believe him if he tried to pass it off as love.