Book of the month for August was Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan. The Big Review is below.
***Big Reviews are written from the point of view that you have read the book. If this is not yet you, bookmark the page and come back once you have***
Machines Like Me – the blurb
Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret.
When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality.
This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – and soon a love triangle forms, which leads Charlie, Miranda and Adam to a profound moral dilemma. Can you design the perfect partner? What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives?
What does it mean to be human?
When flicking through the first few pages of the book I was surprised to realize just how many Ian McEwan’s novels I had read. Everyone is quite different so I suppose it is easy to forget that yes The Children Act was by him AND Sweet Tooth. Machines Like Me, set in an alternative 1980s with social media, internet and robots, was no different (or should that be was different) examining what it means to be human. There were a trio of characters with a lot of inner musings from robot owner Charlie who mulled over politics and Miranda’s feelings for him. Although he seemed to spend very little time worrying about Adam’s ability to inflict violence and kill his kill switch. I don’t think that I would be one of the first people to purchase a robot (nor even one of the middle people) but if I had and it broke my arm before preventing me from turning it off I would sooner move out of my own home than go to sleep with it sitting in my kitchen.
I don’t feel we really got to the bottom of why Charlie bought a robot or kept Adam when he turned violent and professed his love for Miranda. Charlie was short on money and didn’t seem to get any benefit from Adam so why keep him? The conversation with Alan Turing (interesting addition) when Charlie found out the robots were killing themselves was a significant twist in the tale and made me look at the book in a new light. Are we humans so horrible that strangers to our race would not want to live amongst us?
At times it wandered too far off the plot for my taste and I had to try very hard not to skip paragraphs just to get to the bits where the story moved along. Overall though it is an excellent book club book with morals, politics and ethics in abundance to get your teeth into.
Get Involved
If you would like to get involved with the Book Of The Month choices try answering the Book Club questions published every month. Just search in the footnotes section for the ‘Get Involved’ articles. A new book is chosen every month so keep your eyes peeled for the Lowdown on September’s book of the month soon.
