Unusually, I am not going to write a full review of this. To say I was disappointed by the book would be an understatement. It was clear what Ian McEwan was trying to do. His problem was that it didn’t work, couldn’t develop a focus and meandered to its own detriment.
We have a
Mr Friend, who plays at making money on stock markets. He buys an intelligent
robot called Adam (yes, there are Eves as well) and lo and behold it’s better
at the job than he is. It’s also better at seducing his girlfriend. The
relationship that develops between the two humans and the android is
purportedly at the centre of the novel, but this keeps being crowded out by
what regularly seems to extraneous subplots. Quite early on in the book, this
particular reader was caused to judge inaccuracy when the principal character
described buying a personal computer in a decade before they existed. I thought
it might be a mistake, but it was part of an idea that permeated the book and
permeated unsuccessfully.
The
rationale was that Alan Turing had not died in the 1950s, but had lived on the
extend computing, information technology and robotics beyond where it did in
fact reach by the end of the 1960s. This allowed a fully formed robot that
satisfied the Turing test during the 1970s. This then allowed Ian McEwan to
rewrite the history of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure in office, create a defeat in
the Falklands War and examine where British society might have finished.
But there
was also a false conviction in a rape trial, a vendetta pursued by the accused
against the accuser, which was Mr Friend’s girlfriend. The complications merely
got in the way of any plot that might develop. When the robots started showing
signs of paranoia and self-harm, this seemed to be just another side angle on
what was a list of asides. Overall, this was not a successful read.
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