My cameo in Ian McEwan's novel Solar
First Posted: 2026.05.10, Last Revised: 2026.05.10, Author: Tom Brown
This is the story of how I was written into Ian McEwan's 2010 novel Solar as an annoying know-it-all (perish the thought), only to be strangled a few pages later.
The scene: the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, 2008.
Ian McEwan was due to speak to John Mullan about his recent novels On Chesil Beach and Atonement (the recording of the event is still on the Hay Festival website).
McEwan surprised the crowd by reading a passage from the new book he was working on. He wanted to write about climate change, and found a way in via "human nature": his protagonist is Nobel-prize-winning physicist Michael Beard, a man full of faults who steals a colleague's work on artificial photosynthesis. A breakthrough will allow the efficient separation of hydrogen from water, which can then be combined "with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere…to make an all-purpose liquid fuel".
The passage follows the gluttonous Michael Beard as he boards a train with a bag of salt and vinegar crisps.
He settles down in his seat, opens the bag, and savours the first bite: the crunch, the acidic tang on his palate.
Then, to his disbelief, the man opposite plunges his hand into the packet. Horror! Not knowing what else to do, Beard takes another crisp. The man opposite does the same. Beard, getting more and more agitated, alternates with the man until the packet is empty.
Furious at his impudence, he takes the man's water bottle, drains it, and slams it back on the table in defiance.
Only later does he realise that the packet he bought is still in his pocket. He has been eating the other man's crisps.
The reversal of perspective feels revelatory.
After accepting the audience's appreciation, Ian McEwan took a few questions. Someone stood up and said they felt sure they'd heard the story before (one hour and six minutes into the recording):
The story of the salt and vinegar crisps, which you told in a very entertaining manner, is an old story, it's one I've certainly read in a novel before. [McEwan: oh my God] I think a packet of chocolate digestives was the bone of contention there. I'm afraid I can't remember where I read it, but I certainly have. I wonder if you're aware of this and if you thought you might be laying yourself open to claims of…misappropriating…
McEwan replied:
It could well be because I overheard someone tell the story to someone else. I wasn't on a train but I overheard it. It might have the ring of urban legend too, so I mean if it doesn't appear in my novel at all, you'll know why…[laughter]…because I read it aloud at Hay. But, no, thank you, if you could remember the novel that would be very helpful…It would save me an awful lot of trouble [laughter]
Afterwards, I went up to the stage and caught McEwan before he left, and told him that the version of the story with biscuits was from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (I couldn't remember which one at the time, but it was So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish). McEwan rolled his eyes and said something along the lines of "Oh dear, am I going to have to read my way through all of that?" and left.
As McEwan later explained in an interview, "in the signing queue afterwards more than six or seven people said that had happened to them, or to someone they know".
The accusation of plagiarism briefly did the rounds in the press.
When the book Solar eventually came out two years later, the story with the crisp packet was still there. McEwan has Beard tell the story to a packed room of climate financiers in London. During the mingling after his speech, a know-it-all lecturer in urban studies and folklore with "a certain autistic doggedness", Jeremy Mellon, accuses Beard of stealing the story and explains that it is in fact a version of the Unwitting Thief, an urban legend. He tells Beard "[t]he writer Douglas Adams put a version of it in a novel in the mid eighties". Beard dismisses him with irritation.
A few pages later Beard dreams of strangling Mellon: "With the long and easy reach of sleeplessness, he saw his hand close round Mellon's throat and squeeze until he dropped to his knees to make his apology in gasps."
So there you go! Mellon is my cameo.
Interviewed by The New Yorker in 2009, McEwan seems to imply that he planned it this way all along:
After McEwan finished his reading, an audience member observed that a similar riff had appeared in Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series. The next day, the British press halfheartedly raised the question of plagiarism—a pale retread of a furor two years ago, when the Mail on Sunday revealed that several phrases in “Atonement” resembled medical descriptions in a nurse’s wartime memoir. (McEwan had thanked the nurse in his acknowledgments.) McEwan claimed to be unfazed by the Wales incident. The chips story, he said, was an urban legend dating to the nineteen-twenties. “The scene is partially about what happens if you have an experience, and then you’re told it’s an urban legend. Your life is suddenly rendered inauthentic. Now, one of Beard’s friends can say, ‘But I read that in a Douglas Adams novel!’ So it’s even better.”
Rereading Solar in 2026, it's the climate and energy sections that interest me most. As a string theorist who transitioned to modelling renewable energy systems in 2012, it's hard to imagine string theory being of any use in designing artificial photosynthesis. But McEwan's arguments for taking climate change seriously, and his theme of the difficulty of restraint while fossil fuels are cheaper, still resonate.