Machines Like Me

February 11, 2019
McEwan’s thought-provoking novel (after Nutshell) is about the increasingly fraught relationship between a man, a woman, and a synthetic human. Opening in an alternate 1982 London in which technology is not dissimilar from today’s (characters text and send emails), 32-year-old Charlie spends £86,000 of his inheritance on the “first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks,” who can pass for human unless closely inspected. His name is Adam (there are 12 Adams and 13 Eves total; the Eves sell out first), and Charlie designs Adam’s personality along with his neighbor and girlfriend Miranda. Soon, Adam informs Charlie that he “should be careful of trusting her completely,” and quickly falls in love with her, thus inextricably binding their fates together. The novel’s highlight is Adam, a consistently surprising character who quickly disables his own kill switch and composes an endless stream of haiku dedicated to Miranda because, as he states, “the lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are, will be the only necessary form” as misunderstanding is eradicated in the future. The novel loses steam when Adam’s not the focus: much page space is devoted to a thread about an orphan boy, as well as Charlie’s thoughts and feelings about Miranda. Though the reader may wish for a tighter story, this is nonetheless an intriguing novel about humans, machines, and what constitutes a self.

Steven Crossley is a frequent narrator for McEwan's novels, and one who conveys with subtle effect McEwan's most ingenious and subversive storylines. That voice is a modern variation of the detached, worldly narrator of classic British suspense fiction--a voice that might have fit Adam, one of the first 25 autonomous robots on the market, rather than Adam's owner, Charlie, this book's protagonist and designated narrator. Charlie is another of McEwan's hapless innocents, a struggling day trader in an alternative Thatcher-era London where Britain has lost the Falklands War, where WWII code breaker Alan Turing is a revered elder, and where Charlie becomes the first man cuckolded by a machine. This high-class entertainment challenges the mind, tests the wits, and teases and confounds the imagination at every turn. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine