Three is definitely a crowd in this rambling tale
AI and relationship ideas intrigue, but story often feels like loosely connected ideas
As successful as he’s been as a novelist, Ian McEwan may have missed his calling as a short-story writer. His best novels have always been his quickest, and he has said that he enjoys the idea of writing books that can be consumed in a single sitting. In his longer works, he often wanders and loses the thread.
Machines Like Me feels like such a novel: an assemblage of fascinating ideas and themes that don’t all fit together. While not an overly complex novel, it covers a lot of ground and has a tendency to ramble.
In the first place, it’s the story of Charlie Friend, a shabby-genteel day trader, who falls in love with a tenant of his named Miranda. Charlie is also the owner of Adam, one of a limited edition of artificial intelligence robots so advanced they can pass for human. This will lead to problems. Though introspective, Charlie is not very bright, and he seems not to know that three is a crowd.
Because the book is set in the early 1980s, it’s also a work of alternative history. Kennedy was only wounded in Dallas, Reagan never became president, Britain loses the Falklands War, and our tech is about 50 years ahead of schedule, in part because Alan Turing is still alive (and a sort of presiding genius in the story).
Then there are a pair of contrived subplots. Years earlier, Miranda had falsely accused a man of raping her and now he is getting out of prison, apparently with thoughts of revenge. Also, Charlie and Miranda want to adopt a child that Charlie accidentally meets at a park. Adoption is something Adam, with his knack for making money on the stock market, might be able to help them with, but Adam also seems to resent the idea of the family getting any bigger.
Within this gangly narrative framework, McEwan riffs on politics, technology, justice, relationships and the philosophy of consciousness. Some of this is intriguing, but more often it feels like a series of loosely connected talking points. The moral examination McEwan has always excelled at is still here but diluted into water-cooler fiction.