How would you like to go on a freebie to the Arctic Circle for a couple of weeks? Here’s the deal: all your travel expenses are taken care of; you stay on a beautiful old sailing ship, most likely in some remote, picturesque bay far off the tourist map; you’ll see killer whales and polar bears, possibly even the odd narwhal; you’ll get to zoom around the pristine wilderness on skidoos; your food is prepared by a top Italian chef; there’s lashings of booze (albeit rather heady North African plonk); almost all your travelling companions will be famous in some way: Vikram Seth, Rachel Whiteread, Ian McEwan, Marcus Brigstocke.
Oh all right — I lost you with Marcus Brigstocke. But up until that point it was sounding pretty tasty, wasn’t it? I know I’d be sorely tempted to go on a trip like that. I’ve been up there myself — a 300-mile round trip around Svalbard on skidoos in search of polar bears — and it really is one of the most awesome landscapes you’ll ever see. That extraordinary, near-perpetual light you get in spring. The mewing of the kittiwakes over the fjords, with distant white mountains which yet look so eerily close, and could have been the models for the kingdom of the armoured bears in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. God, I’d go again like a shot.
And I almost could have done too, because a few years ago I went to interview the artist who organises these expeditions, for a well-funded charity called Cape Farewell. His name’s David Buckland and he often invites journalists along to give his trips publicity. There’s just one snag — quite a major one if you’re me: you kind of have to believe in man-made global warming.
I say ‘kind of’ because, I suppose, at a push you could go on the trip as a closet denier and spend the whole time faking it. ‘Yes, yes! So beautiful and moving!’ you could say as KT Tunstall sang to you her latest composition — ‘Lonely Polar Bear On A Meltin’ Ice Floe’ — while bald, vegan turntable maestro Moby droned on in the background telling anyone who’d listen that, of course, the real elephant in the room with global warming is our ongoing disgusting practice of eating dead animals. But I think the billowing clouds of Algerian-plonk-fuelled sanctimoniousness might drive you mad in the end.
Also, supposing you did survive the trip, you’d subsequently be required to propagandise on behalf of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) cause. That’s the tacit deal on these Cape Farewell expeditions. In return for their lavish hospitality you’re politely encouraged to produce some kind of artistic endeavour which spreads the word about the dread threat of climate change: say, a song if you’re Martha Wainwright, an ice dance if you’re Siobhan Davies, a string of crap, unfunny global-warming-denier jokes from Marcus Brigstocke.
Which is how Ian McEwan’s latest book Solar came about. I read it on holiday and found it fascinating, though less because of the text — it reads like the sort of project you might be set on a UEA Creative Writing course: write a book about an irredeemably hateful character; really get under his skin; try to avoid giving the reader any reason why he might give a damn over the next 285 pages — than because of its subtext.
Let us compare and contrast two quotations. The first is from a recent bestseller by one of our most successful literary authors.
‘There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague of boils and deluge of frogs that suggested a deep and constant inclination enacted over the centuries to believe that one was always living at the End of Days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world and therefore made more sense or was just a little less irrelevant.’
And the second is from a BBC interview with a chicken-licken celebrity, sounding off about Al Gore’s supposed ‘consensus’ on global warming: ‘The world of science is not at loggerheads. The consensus is colossal.’
You’ll have twigged already that the two men quoted are the self-same Ian McEwan. But this is what’s puzzling. In his public pronouncements on the subject, McEwan comes across as an ardent Warmist. Yet in his book, he has managed to create the most persuasive literary argument against the corruption and dishonesty of the AGW industry since Michael Crichton’s State of Fear.
Now I suppose you could theorise that this is because McEwan has a split personality — Green Ian who does the public appearances; Evil Denier Ian who does the writing — or that he is so determinedly rigorous a stylist that he felt compelled by sheer artistic integrity to create a book with a message the exact opposite of what he believes. But I think the most likely explanation is cognitive dissonance.
McEwan the literary celeb thinks he knows what he thinks: global warming is dangerous, unprecedented and man-made. McEwan the creative visionary understands better. Why else did he make his AGW-exploiting scientist anti-hero Michael Beard so utterly despicable? Why else are all the best lines — ‘Hammer looked sceptical. “If this place isn’t hotting up, we’re fucked.”’ — essentially sympathetic to the deniers’ position?
No, this isn’t just a re-run of Milton in Paradise Lost giving Satan the best tunes. Read Solar (actually, don’t bother) and you’ll see that whatever McEwan the professed AGW-believer might have wished, there simply isn’t enough persuasive material out there to support his cause.
Sure, he’ll throw out lines like: ‘Ornithologists, epidemiologists, oceano-graphers and glaciologists, salmon fishermen and ski-lift operators, the consensus is overwhelming. Some weak-brained journalists write against it because they think it’s a sign of independent thinking.’ But this desperate mix of argumentum ad verecundiam and argumentum ad hominem isn’t persuading anybody. It’s those passages where he expresses the opposite viewpoint that carry the most intellectual conviction.
Ian McEwan is not stupid. What he has instinctively grasped is that for all the welter of ‘evidence’ supporting it, AGW is essentially a socio-political fantasy, not a scientific reality. It exists only because a significant number of the world’s opinion-formers feel in their hearts that it ought to exist.
Why? Lots of reasons. But perhaps the most deep and powerful is the one anatomised in that first quote above: the belief held by each successive generation of man that his is the era so important it will be the one when Armageddon finally comes and, not only that, but that he is the one personally responsible for it thanks to his sinfulness/failure-to-sacrifice-enough-virgins-to-the-gods/insufficient-recycling/delete-as-applicable.
Apparently, when it first emerged that Solar had done a mild mickey-take in its Arctic sequences — Beard having his willy frozen to his zip while taking a pee; pretentious artists engaged in projects of dubious value — there were murmurings of mild discontent from the Cape Farewell true believers. But McEwan’s real ingratitude to his Arctic freebie-providers lies not in what he has done consciously but what he has done unconsciously. Having set out to promote their faith, he has instead managed to demolish it almost entirely. Whoops!
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