Binary code love
Ian McEwan’s astonishing new novel focuses on a love triangle. Nothing remarkable there, except that one of the threesome is an android. That’s so quintessentially McEwan. You never know what his fiction will feature next: climate change; the voice of an unborn Hamlet; brain surgery; a religious cult and blood transfusions. And now this.
It’s a 1980s UK which has lost the Falklands War. JFK is alive; so is John Lennon. Mathematician Alan Turing hasn’t killed himself. He’s a grand old man of science, designing machines that can’t be distinguished from humans.
The first batch are unimaginatively called Adam or Eve. They cover a range of ethnicities, have “functional mucous membranes” and are built to be “friend and factotum”. One is bought with a legacy by 30-ish Charlie, dabbler, loser, bungler, infatuated with Miranda from the floor above. A relationship begins between the two humans. Enter the android, along with multiple jealousies. It’s daring, “a creation myth made real”. It’s disturbing — and, ultimately, it doesn’t work.
Charlie’s Adam is unsettling (he seeks out online details about Miranda and a man she sent to jail) and curiously banal. He writes awful poetry. His small talk is academic discourse.
There are the typical moral or intellectual dilemmas.
How can machines understand a species that can’t understand itself? Is love a uniquely human experience or can it be translated into binary code?
A novel is a perfectly valid vehicle for issues and ideas, provided it remains a novel. Machines Like Me doesn’t always manage this. Emotional relationships feel unfinished or unconvincing. There’s a surfeit of polemic; research isn’t always worn lightly.
The writing is elegant and textured. The character arcs of Charlie and Miranda move them from different levels of facile selfcentredness to responsibility and forgiveness.
But in this case, you can judge a book by its cover. Both are vivid, arresting, yet ultimately two-dimensional.