Review: Machines Like Me

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took me a while reading this to realize it’s a great book, but I think that’s part of its greatness.

This novel begins slowly when Charlie Friend decides – somewhat irresponsibly – to be among the first purchasers of “an Adam,” a fully functioning robot. Then his relationship with Miranda, his attractive upstairs neighbor, begins to grow more serious. Then they cooperatively provide the information – the character DNA as it were – for Adam’s personality, and Adam begins to experience the world and form a self. As a final ingredient, the couple (trio?) begin to take an interest in Mark, a five-year-old boy neglected by his parents in the neighborhood.

As my quick summary suggests, that all felt disconnected and mildly arbitrary. I was looking for the novel to explore some facet of Charlie or his relationship or the developing Adam , but it felt as if was just adding ingredients.

And then, in a kind of wave, I realized that we were getting “programmed” in the same way Adam was. Ian McEwan – who really is one of the world’s great writers – feeds us a succession of basic concepts. Charlie is a kind of dull normal, an upper-middle-class underachiever who mostly realizes he can interest Miranda only because of the predictable and comfortable stability he embodies. Adam begins as an entirely blank slate, but he gets shaped by the preferences they select for defining his personality.

Each decision the characters make sharpens what we see of every one of them, though. Charlie’s decision to purchase Adam begins to define him as a self; it makes him more aware of his limitations and eventually pushes him to become more fully human in his capacity to care for others. At the same time, it alters his relationship with Miranda which further pushes Adam into a character torn between seeing Charlie and Miranda as pseudo-parents and pseudo-lover/rivals.

As a result, even though it starts with basic premises, this novel gets deeper and deeper. It becomes, by the middle third, a sustained inquiry into one of the fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human? Adam is clearly the product of a kind of programming – though he evolves as a self from his initial programming – but in some ways, so are all three of the others. Charlie “programs” Miranda as he tries to win her into a romantic relationship. Mark, as a child, is still subject to being shaped by the way the others treat him. And Charlie himself gets reshaped by the way others respond to his desires. In a telling scene, when Miranda introduces him to her father, her father mistakes him for the robot and finds Adam “better” at being human.

At a broader level, the novel does the same thing in the way it constructs an alternate history of Great Britain in the post-war years. Most significantly, the brilliant codebreaker and student of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, does not die as a consequence of homophobia. He survives, with dramatic results for the progress of computers and robotic science. It’s a single event – one item in the basic “computer code” of history – but it’s sufficient to change the world as we know it; enough, for instance, for us to have robots in the midst of the Thatcher Administration. (A separate event has the British lose the Falklands War, changing its status as a world power.)

From the halfway point of this forward – even through a denouement that runs on longer than I’d have imagined – I found this doing some of the best work that fiction can do. It leaves us without comfortable answers about the ethical differences between seeing a child as a blank slate who will grow into a full self and the same consequences for a robot who will, after a day or two of electrical charging, do the same.

The questions here are powerful, and so are the materials we get to answer them. And so, in the end, is the careful, steady novelistic strategy that McEwan uses to share all of them with us.

This one is going on my list of novels I’ll consider teaching in my Introduction to Fiction classes. It’s that richly imagined, and that richly depicted.


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