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What surprised them even more was that it was funny. The author said he had wanted to tackle climate change, a subject "fraught with baggage" for several years, but had struggled to find a way to begin.
The impetus for this novel came in 2005 when he was part of an expedition of artists and scientists who spent several weeks aboard a ship near the north pole to discuss environmental concerns.

"While I was on board I soon realised that the boot room, where we all changed our clothing and left our shoes, had turned into a scene of social chaos," McEwan said, describing how the eminent scientists, who down the hall were gathering to talk earnestly about the future of the humankind, were also capable of stealing each others' footwear and regarding their colleagues with deep distrust. "I realised that it's all about human nature," he said. "The way to write about climate change is through writing about human nature."

The novel's protagonist Michael Beard has been awarded a Nobel prize for his pioneering work on physics, and has discovered that winning the coveted prize has interfered with his work.

McEwan described Beard's constant struggle against "the thing he really wanted, which he did not want to want ... in this case, food". Describing Beard's pleasure at eating a crisp, he wrote: "The trick was to set the fragment at the centre of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth."