This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – a love triangle soon forms. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding. He marries a gripping plot, handled with rarefied skill and dexterity, to a deep excavation of the narrowing gap between the canny and the uncanny, leaving the reader pleasurably dizzied, and marvelling at human existence.Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.

In Machines Like Me, McEwan is grappling, still, with the novel qua novel.

What motivates Adam? Is it jealousy or justice? And how can an algorithm be true to the mess of human ambiguities? Adam’s reaction to these matters provides the book’s tense, resonant climax. They want to adopt a child, Mark, whose mother is a drug addict but children, to androids, are astonishing in their powers of learning and adaptation. An ethically knotty problem in Miranda’s past threatens to resurface, destablising the security that she and Charlie had hoped to find for themselves. The major complications are intensely moral, based on the most ancient literary form there is (the act of revenge). He’s one of several, both male and female, that have been expensively unleashed upon the world.Īt one point, Charlie is mistaken for his robotic companion, and the plot strands also interweave and mirror each other. Ian McEwan plays with us: a character should have purpose, but from where does that purpose derive? On a whim, and with an inheritance from his mother, Charlie purchases a top-of-the-range, remarkably lifelike android called, somewhat unsurprisingly, Adam. He’s bourgeois, with radical leanings, and an expert in electronics (which allows much subtle humour throughout), but has no real purpose in his life. Driverless cars, the internet, mobile phones: it’s all here, but it’s the 1980s.Ĭharlie might have stumbled in from a JG Ballard novel.

Crucially, Alan Turing has survived, becoming the father of a new leap into the technological future. “Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.” The Falklands War has been lost, and Tony Benn is a Jeremy Corbyn-like figure, adored at mass rallies. “The present is the frailest of improbable constructs,” muses Charlie, the narrator. The setting is a drab, divided England that has followed a slightly different path from ours but still subtly reflects our fractious land.

Machines like me and people like you