The Parade,
British author Ian McEwan’s new book is set against a somewhat disorienting revision of his country’s history. It is 1982, and in a computer-savvy 20th century Margaret Thatcher has gone to war over the Falklands and lost. Thousands have been killed and she has resigned, making way for Tony Benn, who will promptly take Britain out of the Common Market. When he is killed in his Brighton hotel by an IRA bomb, however, Dennis Healey will reverse his decision and take the country back in again — a move that would please the author of this reimagined history.
In another revision of history, far from giving in to chemical castration and suicide, Alan Turing is alive in his 70s, living with his male partner and forging ahead with a range of advances on the artificial intelligence front. For it is AI that is at the heart of McEwan’s novel. In a recent interview he described the horror of 400 lives lost in Boeing crashes in terms of a catastrophic malfunction of AI, in which the planes’ “brains” decided against all observable evidence that their engines were stalling and reacted accordingly.
Lazy, self-centred and marginally dishonest, Charlie Friend spends his legacy on one of the first 25 artificial humans. Turing has bought another. Missing out on one of the 13 Eves, Charlie has to be content with an Adam, who looks “like a docker from the Bosphorus”, but who, once he has been charged up and programmed, shows an amazing capacity for learning and a remarkably human tendency to independent thought.
He falls in love with Charlie’s much younger girlfriend Miranda, who is intrigued into a sexual encounter with him and becomes the recipient of his outpouring of original haikus. Miranda’s elderly and ailing father is convinced on first meeting that the admittedly wooden and self-obsessed Charlie is the robot rather than the cultivated and personable Adam.
Charlie has been making a pittance playing the commodity markets on his computer. Introduced to the same game, Adam proves far more successful and is soon making a living that Charlie and Miranda look upon as their own. Here, as in other somewhat irregular aspects of their past lives, however, they have failed to reckon with Adam’s programmed integrity. The news that increasing numbers of Adams and Eves are failing around the world, dumbing themselves down, cutting
themselves off from their human owners, committing virtual suicide, has intrigued but not warned them.
In a novel in which an audacious revision of history is more convincing than the romantic machinations of an unprepossessing cast, and in which the only charismatic character is a sophisticated robot, McEwan asks some fundamental questions not so much about robots as about ourselves: What is it that makes us human? What is consciousness and sentient life? Where does integrity lie? And finally, crucially, “Who’s going to write the algorithm for the little white lie that spares the blushes of a friend?”
Prolific and public-spirited Dave Eggers’s eighth novel is more like a rather formal, read-at-a-sitting novella, describing the making of a road connecting the two halves of a recently war-torn country. For security reasons the foreign contractors are numbered rather than named: dour, work-obsessed Four controls the RS-80, the magnificent modern road-making machine; sociable, flighty, curious Nine rides the quad bike clearing obstructions and locals out of the machine’s way. When Nine’s careless (and forbidden) gregariousness causes him to sicken, help comes from of an enterprising pair of locals, Medallion (because he wears one) and Cousin. Under their generous influence, Four unbends a fraction while Nine takes on some of Four’s sense of responsibility. In spite of Nine’s dereliction, the road — smooth and immaculate with its central double yellow line — is finished in time for the planned unifying parade from the rural south to the capital in the north.
Four admires his handiwork from the plane bearing him home — and hence is witness as we are to what readers must decide for themselves to see as random tragedy or the rankest cynicism.
KATHARINE ENGLAND