Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan Random House 3.5/5 stars “Nearly everything I’ve read in world literature describes varieties of human failure – of understanding, of reason, of wisdom, of proper sympathies. Failures of cognition, honesty, kindness, self-awareness; superb depictions of murder, cruelty, greed, stupidity, self-delusion, above all, profound misunderstandings of others.” This succinct literary history is delivered halfway through Machines Like Me , Ian McEwan’s 15th novel. The same potted summary could just as easily encapsulate McEwan’s entire body of work. Whether he is dramatising the distortions generated by obsessive passion ( Enduring Love , 1997), ideological schisms ( Black Dogs , 1992), incipient adulthood ( The Cement Garden , 1978) or unremitting grief ( The Child in Time , 1987), McEwan’s fiction finds its feet by stumbling gracefully past human limitations and misapprehensions. What injects particular irony into the judgment quoted above is the character that voices it. Although in this case, the word “character” is open to interpretation. The speaker is Adam: in old 20th century currency he is a “robot”; in McEwan’s 21st century imagination, he is the most advanced “artificial human” ever made. To be exact, he is one of 25 advanced artificial humans: the 12 males being called Adam, and the 13 females (surprise, surprise) named Eve. How original, if you’ll pardon the pun. The Adam who stars in Machines Like Me is bought for £86,000 (US$112,000) by Charlie Friend, a disgraced lawyer turned mediocre one-man stockbroker and occasional author: his big hit, conveniently, is a treatise on artificial intelligence. While Charlie Friend sounds like a parody of Martin Amis, his defiantly bland character feels moulded by another enfant terrible of 1980s British fiction, Julian Barnes: “I passed most of my life, especially when alone, in a state of mood-neutrality, with my personality, whatever that was, in suspension. Not bold, not withdrawn. Simply here, neither content nor morose […] Intermittent regrets about the past, occasional forebodings about the future, barely aware of the present except in the obvious sensory realm.” One example of Charlie’s existential dithering is Miranda, who lives in the flat upstairs. Her impossible beauty, enigmatic reserve, bookish focus and impressive sexual technique make her a typical McEwan heroine. Charlie doesn’t realise he is falling for Miranda until he plugs Adam into a socket in his dismal kitchen. “I saw how precious [Miranda] was to me and how carelessly I could lose her […] I was an idiot. I had to tell her.” Here is the novel’s rickety love triangle. Adam’s role in this is crucial but complex. Initially, he is a mirror for Charlie to compare and contrast his own foibles. Is that “standby” mode as he charges his battery a metaphor for Charlie’s own “mood-neutrality”? But Adam is also the catalyst for Charlie to acknowledge the depth and nature of his feelings for Miranda. Neither version bodes well: Charlie is portrayed as a passive drifter who needs other people to confirm his feelings. The problem with such socially defined emotions is that they tend towards the negative: jealousy, insecurity, bravado, envy and, at their worst, violent treachery. And so it plays out, like a science-fiction soap opera. Charlie and Miranda get together under Adam’s nose, which doesn’t take long to smell a rat. Adam warns Charlie that Miranda has a dark past and may not be trustworthy. Is this intuition or a self-fulfilling prophecy? Plant a seed of doubt in the mind and that mind will doubt. Charlie scoffs until he realises Adam has accessed records of a rape trial in which Miranda was the defendant. After the couple row bitterly about politics, Miranda sleeps with Adam, out of curiosity as much as anything else. Charlie overhears the tryst and is furious; Adam declares himself in love and begins endless haikus in Miranda’s honour. The tempers climax in a nasty confrontation. When Charlie tries to Ctrl-Alt-Delete Adam without his consent, Adam snaps Charlie’s wrist like a twig. At this point, we wonder: is Adam tracing the same trajectory as 2001 ’s Hal, only as a sinister romantic hero? Or is he simply doing what human males tend to – lusting, coveting and cheating, albeit with enough strength to hoist a car over his head? If the literary backdrop for McEwan’s ménage a trois is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the social and political scenery is a remix of 1980s Britain. Margaret Thatcher is still prime minister. She still invades the Falklands, only this time her warships are destroyed by Argentina’s superior technology. Not only are all The Beatles still alive, so, too, is Alan Turing, the British computer genius whose work code-breaking the Nazi’s Enigma machine has been estimated to have shortened the second world war by two years. This fictional Turing did not die in 1954 – whether by suicide, accident or even, as conspiracy theorists theorise, murder. Instead, he survived the barbaric age that criminalised his homosexuality to become an even greater technological pioneer than he was in our reality. McEwan’s crisp voice is never crisper than when making such grand and possibly grandiose statements. In this, he is better suited to telling a story than showing one, in full flow when meditating on how love alters over time or pondering what separates humans from intelligent machines Charlie meets Turing during a drunken night out. Having paid homage, he asks whether Turing has experienced problems with his own Adam: Charlie’s wrist is still healing. The answer is no, but only because Turing dismantled his Adam to discover what made it tick. During a subsequent conversation, however, he reveals that many of the 25 artificial humans have self-immolated: one Adam dumbed himself down to the state of an electric toaster; two Eves ended their existence in a digital suicide pact. That the three scenes involving Charlie and Turing are among the novel’s best moments makes sense. Turing’s elegantly abstract intelligence married to a red-hot personal life feels recognisably McEwanesque. Their shared interest in science, sex, death, war and morality energises Turing’s verbal assault on Charlie in the novel’s final pages. Turing is certain of why so many Adam and Eves are planning their own demise: suicide is a logical response to the misery of the human condition. “We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world.” In Turing’s version, these imperfections have been created by a distinctly capitalist god: “Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it will lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species.” This is Machines Like Me at its best. McEwan’s crisp voice is never crisper than when making such grand and possibly grandiose statements. In this, he is better suited to telling a story than showing one, in full flow when meditating on how love alters over time or pondering what separates humans from intelligent machines. McEwan proves particularly sharp when turning his alternative history to account. “The present is the frailest of constructs,” he writes through Charlie. This nicely weighted phrase ties together the evolution of Adam’s data-processed consciousness, the sudden shifts and reversals of politics and the billions of minuscule decisions that together make (or break) a life. A similar interplay of chance and design nods towards McEwan’s own art form, which to cite Charlie’s winning phrase is a “sector of all imagined possibilities”. What is a novel other than a construct of imagined possibilities – a form of artificial intelligence? In the same way that Adam is moulded by Charlie and Miranda who collaborate on his programming, so McEwan’s narrative will be shaped by his readers, and the myriad experiences we bring to it. Bearing this in mind, I have my own reservations about McEwan’s media-donnish prose centred on a plot that feels drier and more contrived than urgent and vital. There are interesting but ungainly information dumps in which Charlie impersonates a pompous academic interrupting enjoyable dinner party conversation with mini-lectures about everything from anthropology to quantum theory. More damagingly, the main narrative engine – Miranda’s involvement in that rape trial – isn’t just unconvincing but teased as a “did-she-didn’t-she” mystery, and reeks of something unsavoury, despite the story’s strenuous attempts to persuade us otherwise. If you felt queasy reading similar passages at the end of McEwan’s 2005 bestseller Saturday , you might find yourself reaching for the sick bag once again. Viewed through Adam’s ultra-logical eyes, these baffling plot devices can be explained away using Turing’s poignant theory: what artificial humans struggle with is human contradiction, caprice and deceit. Actual flesh-and-blood readers might find such contrivances harder to swallow.