The main character in Solar can't control his appetites. He eats like Jabba the Hut at a casino buffet, drinks like an alcoholic fish and chases women every chance he gets. He's also an unorganized slob who would rather just travel or stay somewhere else rather than clean up his own living space. On top of being greedy, opportunistic, selfish and lazy, he has no regard for the future. He can rationalize any potential warning signs of health issues or unpleasant business he'd rather not deal with and just keep living exactly the way he always has. 
 Sound like any species you know? 
 Michael Beard is an English physicist who once won a Nobel Prize and has been coasting off that accomplishment ever since. Rather than do any more work in physics, he's content to give lectures and take a series of figurehead jobs. He's also been married five times and has never been faithful to any of them, but wife #5, Patrice, has turned the tables by having an open affair with a workman doing repairs on their house. 
 Naturally, the self-absorbed Beard wants what he can't have and becomes obsessed with winning Patrice's love again. He's also taken a job as the titular head of an English think tank working on alternative energy sources and stopping global warming. Beard believes in the science of climate change, but he figures it'll be somebody else's problem after he's dead so he's really only interested in the paycheck. A zealous young researcher is driving him nuts by wanting to work on solar energy instead of the worthless wind turbine Beard has committed the institute to building. 
 A freak accident puts Beard in a position to claim credit for groundbreaking research and just maybe invent a whole new energy industry and save the world. If he can put aside his greed and need for instant gratification long enough to make it work. 
 Clever, Mr. McEwan. Very clever. Using a brilliant but lazy man who knows full well that he's courting disaster with his lifestyle and his actions, but is just too weak willed to do anything about it as both a potential savior and symbolic destroyer of the world was a nice piece of work.