Author McEwan profiled around climate change and getting to the point on the oblique angle.

Ian McEwan chose climate change as a subject after “pondering how to write the world’s worst novel”. He said it would have moral intensity, worthy attitudes, graphs, statistics, biology, chemistry, fashionable pessimism and, worse, factitious optimism.

But the book he finally began to write this year has none of those “do-not-read” qualities. “The way to write about climate change is to write about a deeply flawed person,” he told almost 2000 people – the biggest crowd since the biennial Adelaide Writers’ Week began in 1960 – who endured 37-degree heat to hear his first public reading from his 12th novel-in-progress.

Michael Beard, his protagonist, is a thrice-divorced womaniser and winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, a specialist in light who has made “planetary stupidity” his business and believes solar energy can save the world.