Machines Like Me
Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape £18.99
After Britain lost the Falklands War – who can forget Mrs Thatcher’s regretful ‘I take it on my shoulders’ speech? – Tony Benn led Labour to Election victory, only to be killed soon afterwards in the Brighton bombing. Meanwhile, President Carter was elected for a second term, defeating the now largely forgotten Republican contender Ronald Reagan.
Around that same time, all four Beatles got back together. Sadly, their new album, Love And Lemons, was widely criticised for its lush sentimentality. People thought they might have done better without the help of an 80-strong symphony orchestra.
Will robots ever be capable of feeling true emotion? This is a question that’s often been tackled in science fiction, most notably in Blade Runner and in the ingenious Ex Machina
It takes very little for the future to be altered. As Ian McEwan’s narrator points out in this sublimely playful novel, ‘the present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different’.
McEwan has created an oddity: a science fiction novel set not in the future but in a recent past, subtly and not-so-subtly altered to incorporate events that might have happened, had chance taken a different turn.
This has been done before, of course. Numerous films and books have toyed with alternative realities set in the present day. Perhaps the most famous of them all is It’s A Wonderful Life, in which the Jimmy Stewart character is shown how different his community would have been had he never been born.
Robert Harris’s Fatherland, which was set in a post-war Britain ruled over by a victorious Third Reich, with King Edward and Queen Wallis on the throne, even included a reference to a group of young Liverpudlians playing to packed audiences in Hamburg, being condemned by Berlin music critic for their ‘pernicious, Negroid wailings’.
Most of the key alterations in McEwan’s revised world derive from the perfectly possible reversal of a single decision.
In 1952, Alan Turing, the computer scientist whose code-breaking work may well have shortened the war by two years, saving millions of lives, was prosecuted for homosexual acts. He was then given the choice of chemical castration, or a term in prison. He chose chemical castration, a punishment that caused psychological damage, which led to his suicide two years later.
But what if he had chosen a term in prison? McEwan imagines him thriving there, and then living for many more decades, feted by the great and the good, his brilliant inventions, not least with robots, transforming our world for better or worse.
In 1982, McEwan’s flaky hero, Charlie Friend, spends an inheritance of £86,000 on one of only 25 new robots. These robots are as close to fully functional replicas of human beings as they could possibly be, so much so that they are hard to tell apart. Thirteen of this first edition are female, and 12 male. They can be programmed both for character and sexual preference. ‘By the end of the first week, all the Eves had sold out,’ writes McEwan, who maintains this level of sly fun throughout the book, even when things begin to turn very dark.
Most elements of Britain in the Eighties are left intact. The robot – Adam – comes with a 470-page handbook. Once brought back to the home, he takes 16 hours to charge, and then requires a further six hours a night connected to a 13-amp socket. His breath smells like the back of a warm TV set. ‘He couldn’t drive as yet and was not allowed to swim or shower or go out in the rain without an umbrella, or operate a chainsaw unsupervised.’ Furthermore, he urinates once a day, in the late morning.
On the other hand, he has a perfect memory. He can record every moment of his existence, and has a phenomenal ability to learn, zipping through the entire works of Shakespeare in a matter of minutes, then remembering every word. And he is a dab hand at domestic chores, too. ‘Cover the chicken with tinfoil. From the size of it I’d say 70 minutes at 180,’ he chips in when Charlie is dithering over his Sunday roast.
But, inevitably, things soon go haywire. As a general rule, the whole point of robots in fiction is to suffer malfunctions. First, the perfectly formed Adam has a torrid affair with Charlie’s young girlfriend Miranda, and then he falls in love with her. Understandably, this enrages Charlie, who refuses to believe that Adam’s feelings for her are authentic. ‘His erotic life was a simulacrum,’ he complains. ‘He cared for her as a dishwasher cares for its dishes.’
But is this so? Will robots ever be capable of feeling true emotion? This is a question that’s often been tackled in science fiction, most notably in Blade Runner, and, more recently, in the ingenious Ex Machina. As McEwan points out: ‘Alan Turing himself had often said and written in his youth that the moment we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine.’
McEwan tackles this fascinating question, and many more. Can human beings, with all our in-built emotional shortcomings, self-delusions, and moral inconsistencies ever be duplicated by machines? And, if not, how can robots ever be expected to navigate their clear-cut ways through such a higgledy-piggledy universe?
Like quite a few McEwan novels, this one is a little over-egged. Plot is piled upon plot, so that there are soon plots galore, each one contriving to make the others less plausible.
The presence in a household of an over-sensitive robot – and, moreover, an over-sensitive robot capable of inflicting severe injury – is one of a number of competing storylines. Another involves a child that Miranda is anxious to adopt, another her ailing father, who can’t tell Adam from Charlie, and yet another Miranda’s involvement in a historical rape case, and her fear of retribution at the hands of the rapist.
Meanwhile, Charlie is plotting to disable Adam, and, for one reason or another, Adam’s fellow robots are fast losing their will to live. On top of all this, the little details of our known world are overturned: Tolstoy’s most famous novel is called All’s Well That Ends Well, electric cars can travel 1,000 miles on a single charge, and people argue about what would have happened if Argentina had lost the Falklands War. It’s a lot to take on board.
In the end, McEwan deftly manages to weave these various strands together, but there are times when he comes close to testing the capacity of the reader to suspend disbelief.
McEwan deftly manages to weave these various strands together, but there are times when he comes close to testing the capacity of the reader to suspend disbelief
McEwan is, above all, a novelist of ideas, and this can lead to a conflict. From time to time, the ideas are at odds with the novel. In robot terms, a novel is a simulacrum of messy real life, and it can find it uncomfortable to accommodate shiny, steely new ideas. In this, he sometimes reminds me of Iris Murdoch, with her fierce intelligence, creating characters who think and act in a way that is strangely unreal.
McEwan would probably argue that it was never his intention to create an earnest work of naturalism, and that Machines Like Me is intended as a medley of skilfully interweaved fairy tales for the computer age. He certainly succeeds in this: there isn’t a page that fails to make you think, or make you smile – and often he manages both at the same time.