Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan

An interesting mess from Ian McEwan

I confess to struggling with the novels of Ian McEwan. He's a skilled story teller, that's for sure, his characters and plots always get you in. One of the reasons he's so successful, I think, is that it's easy to see yourself in his books. The tricky situations, moral quandaries and difficult personalities. He's also such an astute observer that you find yourself marvelling at how succinctly he can encapsulate complex truths. There's one section in Machines Like Me where he describes cowardice as the result of an overactive imagination. We become immobilised when we imagine all the bad things that can happen in a situation. Having said all that, I still find McEwan's novels a bit of a let down. They're so slick and professional, McEwan is the consummate writer, and yet they leave me with an empty feeling. Some ingredient seems missing. I've only read the earlier and later novels, not the middle ones, so it's most likely I've missed the ones that tick all the boxes. Friends of mine swear by his novels and I trust their taste.

McEwan's latest, Machines Like Me, is set in England in 1982. The Falklands War is being fought. Alan Turing, genius code breaker and early father of the modern computer, has lived on and prospered rather than die a premature death. Thirty-two year old Charlie Friend has bought an early model robot, named Adam. A hyper intelligent android, he has to be programmed with various personality settings. He decides to program Adam with the help of his girlfriend, Miranda, who conveniently lives in the flat above him. The whole idea is that Adam will in some way be their creation, their child almost.

Adam is plugged in and comes to “life”. Soon enough he is hoovering up all the information available on the world wide web and processing it. He tells Charlie there is something dodgy about Miranda, and to beware. Secrets come out. Miranda was involved in a court case involving rape, but she lied giving evidence. We learn more. The lying was done in the service of a greater justice. Seeing it was Adam's artificial intelligence that prompted these confessions, the relationship between Charlie, Miranda and Adam becomes complex. Bizarrely so. When Adam declares he's in love with Miranda, Charlie exclaims, perhaps preempting the reader's reaction, “Ridiculous!” Things get weirder when Adam asks Miranda if he can perform a voyeuristic sex act in front of her. The story haphazardly resolves itself when Miranda and Charlie come to terms with the past, shuffle Adam back off to the factory (where Alan Turing makes a second appearance) and settle down to a normal relationship.

What to make of all of this is anyone's guess. The story seems to have three main aspects. Firstly there's the relationship between Miranda and Charlie, secondly there is Adam, raising questions about the role of technology, and lastly there is the time-frame aspect. Sizeable chunks of the novel are devoted to the Falklands War, Thatcher and the British Labour Party. In some ways it feels like McEwan is using the novel as a way of reliving his early thirties (he was thirty-four at the time). None of these three parts fit together entirely well. Often you even wonder if McEwan himself is taking the story seriously. How are we supposed to treat Adam – as robot or human? By and large, he's treated as human, but every now and again we'll be reminded he's non-human. Which is it? McEwan doesn't strive to imagine a new consciousness or way of being for Adam. It's tempting to call this laziness, but McEwan is not intellectually indolent, so Adam remains a mystery, a weird conceptual void.

Machines Like Me is not science fiction. McEwan doesn't imagine an alternate world. Nor is it really speculative fiction. There's no daring proposal of new ideas. McEwan rather riffs on a lot of favourite topics. This all makes for interesting reading. Indeed, I found the first half very compelling and enjoyable. But by the second half I couldn't figure out how all the different aspects were going to merge together to form a coherent whole. The ending fell like an abrupt full stop. McEwan had suddenly packed up his pens, left his desk and told the reader, Work it out for yourself!

I'm still scratching my head.

Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan. Published by Jonathan Cape.