Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

This book is going to be like marmite for readers

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The blurb

Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding.

Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – a love triangle soon forms.

These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwan’s subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: what makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.

The Review

This book is going to be like marmite for readers, you can just tell. Although you could probably say that about many of McEwan's books. I've read some of the not so favourable reviews and while I do actually agree with a lot of the criticism, I couldn't help but really enjoy this book. This might be in part due to the fact that I read this as an audio book (in the car, with the husband!) and the narration was brilliant.

This is a book that manages to cover a huge amount of moral topics without ever becoming 'preachy'. Obviously it tackles a lot around what it means to be alive or to have conscious thought. This is done incredibly well, with Adam being so advanced and self aware that the argument for his becoming a 'conscious being' starts to make perfect sense. But then he has a 'romantic interlude' with Charlie's love interest, his neighbour upstairs. This, for me, was the most interesting part of the book. Charlie is jealous, and you think, 'well, rightly so!' But actually, if we deny that Adam should be afforded the same rights and qualities as a human, are Charlie's feelings justifiable? Or is he basically getting all bent out of shape over a glorified sex toy? And our protagonist, Charlie, is a bit of a pompous idiot at times, so his abhorrence to this incident was quite delightful to read and the morals underlying this interesting to consider.

For a book about robots this managed to avoid a lot of the clichés you find in this genre. This isn't a book where the robot doesn't know he's a robot or where the AI takes over the world. No, Adam knows from the start what he is, and actually this knowledge causes him more consternation than anything. We get a glimpse into what has happened to all the other Adams and Eves which causes a creeping unease about what might happen to Adam. That you feel an element of horror that something artificially intelligent might destroy itself, shows you just how blurred the line is between human and 'other'. And this is what McEwan is best at - dancing around that blurred line.

The bizarre thing about this book, was the choice to set it in an 'alternative' 1982. Turing is still alive and his character is rather crucial to the plot, as it is due to his advances that the Adam and Eve machines exist at all. But apart from that, the other historical differences are strange; Britain loses the Falklands war, Lennon doesn't die and the Beatles get back together, Thatcher is challenged by Tony Benn for power. Perhaps these changes were supposed to have more importance or parallels to events going on today, but in truth neither of us really understood the significance of altering British political history.

As with all his books, McEwan does tend to go off on what I call, a 'cerebral tangent'. He clearly does a lot of research for his books, and boy, does he like to cram that research and his subsequent musings in, around the actual action. The problem with this is that it can really impact the pace of the story. That aside though, what this book does well is explore what human interactions might be like with a lifelike machine that is as close to consciousness as we can imagine.