I’ve read most books by Ian McEwan and loved all of them—until now. And what a fall from grace for someone who’s been on my favorites list for a long time! The problem I believe is Mr. McEwans venturing into a completely new genre—Science Fiction— and more importantly my familiarity and deep appreciation for it. He appears lost and his efforts at best a novice attempt. For those who don’t quite venerate SciFi, this book might be quite enjoyable like it was to Alex Preston of The Guardian.

The book is set in an alternative reality London of 1982: one that is technologically more advanced than the 2019 when the book was published; where self driving cars are commonplace; one where Mrs. Thatcher and the UK are the losers in the Falklands war; the revered Alan Turing is actually still alive and well, having contributed immensely to the development of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence; J.F.K. misses an assassin’s bullet; Demis Hassabis is born much earlier and collaborates with Alan Turing; and so on… What’s never clear is why any of these are essential to the story. They’re not.

That story features Charlie Friend: an educated but largely unsuccessful man in his early thirties, who is in love with Miranda, the girl living in the flat above him. Charlie comes into some money and ‘unwisely’ as is customary for him, invests it in the purchase of the latest advancement  in robotics technology, Adam: an extremely humanoid robot—he breathes, drinks water and can perform sexually (Mr. McEwan wouldn’t dream of leaving that out.. hah!). Adam has consciousness and a personality and is one of only 25 (siblings?) made available to fortunate and wealthy buyers. He easily passes off for a human in public. 

What unfolds is a love triangle embedded with a horrible secret that Miranda harbors and is forced to come to terms with. There are sidebars of worker uprisings, as robots take away more jobs, a version of Brexit, and a prime minister assassinated. 

I came away with a sense of disbelief. The words “oh, c’mon” come to mind through several parts of the book.

*Spoilers*

Technology progresses in increments. Yet there is this huge leap from Roomba like robot capabilities to a company unveiling an Adam! 

The company that made Adam, decides to sell these 25 robots without any seeming testing, warranty, safety assurances etc. Really? Turns out that most of the robots in the ‘wild’ end up killing themselves—disabling their minds that is—prompting a recall from the company. Again, wouldn’t minimal testing even in a lab environment have revealed this?

Adam breaks Charlie’s wrist to prevent him from hitting his kill switch and threatens him with ripping his arm out if he tried that again. Adam then goes on to announce he has disabled his kill switch (HAL redux?). Would anyone sane, living with a super intelligent but untested and hence unpredictable machine that has hurt him once, continue to house that machine and largely carry on like nothing has happened? “Oh, c’mon!!!”

Alan Turing is still alive and proves P = NP which apparently opens the floodgates to massive technological improvement. Quite a weak and unnecessary premise but the chapter on that presumably demonstrates some research done for the story. *sigh* 

One thing that Mr. McEwan does seem to get right and that resonated with me is the robots’ inability to understand the inherent contradictions in human existence that eventually leads to most of the machines killing themselves—how we abhor lies in general but freely participate in white lies; how we value life yet directly or indirectly responsible for preventable deaths from war and poverty and so on. The key here which Mr. McEwan completely misses is evolutionary biology. We are not built to be consistent and purely delight in consciousness. Our actions are deeply and unconsciously motivated by our ‘program’s’ underpinning objective of genetic proliferation. 

Ian McEwan: to paraphrase Chris Nolan’s Batman, sometimes you write enough books to become the villain. Hopefully your next book will be atonement (see what I did there?) for this misadventure.