Atonement was the first 'grown up' book that I ever picked out for myself and I had a phase of being a big Ian McEwan fan during my latter teenage years. It was very exciting for me when I once spotted him in a cafe in Oxford. But over time, my admiration has become more nuanced. I once went to a book group which was discussing Amsterdam and we all spent the entire session tearing it to pieces and pondering how it had ever won the Booker Prize. Enduring Love was another very strange read. Similarly, On Chesil Beach was deeply underwhelming. On the other hand, I could still appreciate Sweet Tooth and The Children Act and absolutely loved Nutshell. My point is that I do not pick up a McEwan novel with any real assumptions as to its content or indeed whether or not I will enjoy it. McEwan's unpredictability is both his strength and his weakness. With Machines Like Me however, I think we have the strangest book yet.

Set in an alternate 1980s, the story centres around Charlie, a man in his thirties who is drifting through life. He has limited success playing the stock market and otherwise avoids employment. Upstairs lives his twenty-two year old neighbour Miranda, a doctoral student. The Britain that they live in is substantially more technologically advanced than our own. Rather than having committed suicide, Alan Turing has lived on and thrived, being frequently spotted around and about Soho with his long-term partner. It is Turing's pioneering work on artificial intelligence which leads to the creation of the first batch of synthetic humans, nicknamed the Adams and Eves. Thanks to a recent inheritance, Charlie is able to pay the £86,000 for an Adam, having been thwarted in sourcing an Eve. In the hope of bonding with Miranda, Charlie invites her to help him programme Adam's personality, hoping to make ownership of Adam into a kind of pseudo-co-parenting. Naturally, things become rather more complicated. Indeed, one of Adam's first statements is to warn Charlie that Miranda has a dark secret in her past.

Machines Like Me is a novel with a lot going on inside. On the one hand, there are clear parallels with Frankenstein with Charlie choosing synthetic rather than flesh offspring while Miranda, somewhat implausibly, decides she wishes to adopt Mark, a four year-old boy who she and Charlie meet by chance. There are also the usual McEwan concerns around trust and communication in relationships, particularly as Miranda takes Adam to bed early in the novel, leading the robot to declare himself in love with her. On the global scale, we see Britain emerge defeated from the Falklands conflict, with the island abruptly becoming Las Malvinas. The resulting humiliation routs Margaret Thatcher from office and Tony Benn into Downing Street. But although certain events are familiar to those with an awareness of 1980s politics, McEwan is clearly taking potshots at contemporary events. Thatcher is Theresa May, Benn is Corbyn and Machines Like Me is McEwan's Brexit novel, full of disdain for the major players of our government.

Strangely enough, I lent my copy to a tech journalist friend after I finished it and her reading experience was very different to my own. For her, the novel centred far more around technology. She was more focused on the questions around artificial intelligence and picked up on Turing's reference to the unsolved P versus NP problem, something which had completely sailed over my head. McEwan has always had an interest in the boundaries between science, ethics and consciousness. I remember hearing a radio interview with him many years ago in which he described how an early draft of Atonement saw technology as the preserve of the lower classes so a proletariat Robbie Turner slogged in the garden with an electronic headset on while presumably a blue-blooded Cecilia lounged indoors with no need to touch electronics at all. I can see how McEwan would have been drawn to the idea of a love triangle featuring a robot. But it becomes difficult for the reader to engage with this idea with such unsympathetic central characters. Charlie is apathetic to the point of stultification. This may indeed be deliberate since at one point Miranda's father mistakes Charlie for the robot and Adam for the human, but the point is never followed through. This is not Blade Runner, there are no high-octane thrills to be found.

I also failed to connect with Miranda. Her back story may have been intended as morally grey but it just seemed far-fetched. Her behaviour around Charlie and Adam was unnecessarily manipulative. This pattern of selfishness made it even more unlikely that she would be capable of the altruism necessary to parent Mark. Of the trio, the only truly compelling character was Adam. I found him an eerie presence. Sometimes left to charge in the corner, able to maintain an erection thanks to distilled water in his right buttock, composing bad poetry to win Miranda's heart, contemplating the future of art and literature in an ever changing world. He imagines the death of the novel, since 'when the marriage of men and women to machines is complete, this literature will be redundant because we’ll understand each other too well'. Adam thinks far more deeply than either of his human masters and has a far more centred moral code. But that is what he feels like. A conduit for ideas. A talking point. This is a novel about moral issues around artificial intelligence, not one that invites its reader to truly connect.

When I think about what first drew me to Ian McEwan as a writer, it is the agony of Briony's betrayal. Atonement considers the moral responsibility of the story-teller. Briony meant no harm but is caught up in her story and does not see the consequences of her actions. We are asked to believe that the entire novel functions as Briony's attempt to re-write the past. And this is very clever because it means that we never truly 'see' the truth, only Briony's depiction of it. But there was emotion here and genuine human connection. Machines Like Me makes glances at various issues but never settles. We are invited to consider the responsibility we might have towards the beings created via artificial intelligence but there is so little consistency. Can Adam give meaningful consent to sex with Miranda? Particularly in the light of her back story, sexual consent is a recurrent theme but McEwan never really gives answers. Alan Turing's speech to Charlie in the finale implies moral judgment but he too has experimented on the Adam and Eve androids. I finished the novel unsure of McEwan's intended message.

There was enough in Machines for me to find it enjoyable. Having studied 1980s history at various points, I found McEwan's re-imagining of the era to be extremely thought-provoking, particularly in how it reflected our contemporary political climate. Additionally, given my long-term interest in the Enigma code-breakers, I was fascinated by the alternate universe Alan Turing. I loved the idea of him living a contented life as an openly gay national hero. However, the novel's narrative otherwise felt confused and over-loaded. Ironically in a novel concerned with robotics and artificial intelligence, even the human characters felt less like people than vessels for McEwan's musings on the world. Like Adam himself, Machines Like Me is stunning from afar but as you get closer, there is nothing looking back at you.

My thanks to Random House U.K. Vintage Publishing for a review copy via NetGalley of ‘Machines Like Me’ by Ian McEwan. This book was offered on NetGalley at the time of its paperback release in March 2020.

My apologies for the late feedback. I had combined reading with its unabridged audiobook, narrated by Billy Howle.

When it was first published in 2019 Ian McEwan gained a fair amount of press when he made a fuss about ‘Machines Like Me’ being classed as science fiction. Indeed, he was very sniffy and dismissive of the entire genre in a fashion that not only demonstrated his literary snobbery but that he had read little science fiction and was unaware of its history. However, he does mention Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics in the novel so clearly has some familiarity.

So, while McEwan considered this novel as breaking new ground, to those familiar with the genre it really wasn’t and he came off as rather clueless.

As for the plot: Adam is one of 25 androids/synthetic humans and Charlie, who has been fascinated by artificial intelligence all his life, elects to spend a windfall inheritance upon an Adam. Charlie is in love with his upstairs neighbour, Miranda, and suggests that they program Adam’s personality profile together. However, things get complicated when Miranda is intimate with Adam and Adam declares himself in love with her. So essentially a love triangle complicated by one party being a machine.

‘Machines Like Me’ is set in an alternative 1980s that is much more technologically advanced due to Alan Turing not having taken his life in 1954.

McEwan’s world building was lazy. It’s clear that he wanted Turing to play a part in the narrative (he also buys an Adam) so it made sense to set the novel in a time when Turing could have been alive. Yet for the rest McEwan has just tweaked a few 1980s events and then thrown a bunch of modern day aspects into the mix (self-driving cars, plastic pollution in the oceans, mass extinctions, Britain leaving the EU).

This was an okay read, but hardly anything noteworthy or innovative in terms of fiction exploring the human/AI interface or alternative history.

3.5*

Although McEwan is one of my favorite writers and his previous book, Nutshell, is one of the most enjoyable books that I’ve read, I was reluctant to start Machines like Me. Reviews were mixed, which is quite normal for the author, and the alternative British history setting sounded off to me. In the end, I enjoyed reading the thoughts of this smart author although I was right about the setting.

The novel is set in an alternative Great Britain where The Falklands are lost to Argentina, the political environment is different and more importantly to the development of the plot, Alan Turing decides not to follow the homosexuality treatment and choses jail instead. During his time there he manages to solve the P vs NP problem (google search) and then to create the basis for he development pf artificial intelligence. Due to his scientific breakthrough, the world becomes a lot more technical advanced than we are now. As a result, the first synthetic humans are produced and our main character, Charlie, manages to buy one of the 25 products available. Charlieis not a very successful schemer, living from small successes but manages to buy Adam from an inheritance. He is in love with the neighbor upstairs, Miranda and in order to involve her more into his future let’s program part of Adam’s personality which leads to the half-human to also fall in love with the young student. From here some sort of a romantic triangle emerges but that is only a part of the story. Are machines capable of love, creation of art, can they really adapt to our world?

The book develops two main themes, first is the alternative history of GB with all the political, technological and social changes it brings, the 2nd is the life with an artificial human and the struggle for all the parties involved to adapt and all the philosophical questions that raise from there. If you ever read McEwan you might know he likes to ramble a lot on different topics. When he gets it right then the book is brilliant, when he doesn’t it’s a struggle to follow. Here, he both succeeded and failed. I had the feeling I was reading two novels which were carelessly patched together. I thought the first 20% to be a mess and even thought about giving up. The novel gets much better later but the feeling that the alternative history did not mingle well with the artificial humans’ story remained. Also, the whole book felt superficial although the author’s brilliance surfaced on many occasions.

Throughout the dramatic development of the Adams and Eves (as the machines are named), the author puts the question of the possibility for humans and machines to coexist, whether the latter are able to understand and mimic our reason.

“We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages.”

The results are not so optimistic under McEwan’s feather.

A-and-Es were ill equipped to understand human decision-making, the way our principles are warped in the force field of our emotions, our peculiar biases, our self-delusion and all the other well-charted defects of our cognition. Soon, these Adams and Eves were in despair. They couldn’t understand us, because we couldn’t understand ourselves. Their learning programs couldn’t accommodate us. If we didn’t know our own minds, how could we design theirs and expect them to be happy alongside us? But that’s just my hypothesis.’

I will not say too much of the plot and what happens to Adam and his kind, or to Amanda and Charlie’s relationship. I only leave you with Adam’s statement that also gives the title.

"It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together … the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time … we’ll surpass you … and outlast you … even as we love you. Believe me, these lines express no triumph … Only regret."

P.S. I enjoyed his reference to his previous novel by making Adam develop an infatuation with Shakespeare and Hamlet in particular. ;)

I have an inner conflict with
Ian McEwan’s novels, some I love and find staggering in their bravery and bold inspection of human life and what it means to love, lose and live. Some on the other hand I find bland, wordy and as if they are trying too hard. This one falls very firmly into the first category and I can already see myself recommending it to everyone I know.
I was initially baffled but then thrilled by McEwan’s subversion of time and the history and political narrative we all know (though it did make me think that this would make it a tricky book to teach todays A-level students!) and how certain decisions in time by politicians, mathematicians and scientists can change the political landscape so quickly. I enjoyed the little nod to Brexit in the discussion of the European Single Market especially!
But this is the mere back drop to the main plot and most authors would probably have treated them as separate novels and not had the skill to put two such complex ideas together. This is the story of what happens when computing advances far more quickly than society and when AI is created that can genuinely learn not just to think for itself but to feel.

Charlie much like myself is into gadgets. When he inherits a large amount of money he contemplates buying a large house ‘on the other side of the river’ and leaving his pokey flat. But then, he decides to be one of the few people in the world to buy an Adam or an Eve.; totally realistic robots with cutting edge AI that means they will become our equal or even our superior. Charlie, a romantic at heart decides to combine this purchase with embarking on a relationship with the beautiful woman in the upstairs flat and while he completes half of Adam’s personality matrix, he leaves half of it for Miranda to complete satisfying himself that it is as if they are having a child and that the Adam is receiving half of each of them.

What follows is a love story, and a moral and ethical treatise on the subjects of truth and justice and the nature of what makes a sentient being. Other reviewers have mentioned McEwan’s detachment and I think in this case it adds to the feeling of the book. His authors remove from us is mirrored in the remove that Charlie feels first from Miranda and then Adam.

A gem of a book and one that will definitely get people discussing and thinking about the issues for a long time.

This was an interesting read that focused on what makes humans human and how certain elements of life could be different if life had taken another course. It was odd to see a version of the 1980s that progressed in the way depicted but it wasn't the worst alternative history fiction I've encountered as all elements seem considered. The two human main characters were interesting but they could have been developed further as they did not seem as fleshed out as their robot counterpart. This was an interesting read and it made me think about what could have been.

I was very much looking forward to reading Machines Like Me, especially as it was written by the great Mr McEwan. However once read I had a couple of problems with it. The idea is a great one but it sadly lacked in some way and I’ve read better. I was confused, what was the purpose of the political narrative? Odd. Padding maybe? A disjointed book that really tried to like.

It's the 1980s, and the UK is just about to go to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. But this is a modern, progressive society, where – partly thanks to us not killing off Alan Turing through collective homophobia – we're so much more technologically advanced than our actual world, and science has kept up pace with Hollywood sci-fi to such an extent a lot of this 1980s feels like our 2020s. To such an extent, our hero Charlie has just bought an Adam – one of only a dozen close-to-human male robotic machine companions. Oh, and he's also realised he's desperately in love with Miranda, the girl in the flat above, and they could both 'parent' Adam together. So, what does the hugely intelligent electronic resource do when it's first charged up? Give tips on cooking the chicken. And what does it do next? Why, it firmly protests about the very idea of the relationship between Charlie and Miranda, saying she's a wrong'un. But we all know the Frankenstein story, right – we know which of the characters is going to turn out closer to evil, surely?

This was an incredibly readable return to nearly-sci-fi-but-not-quite for Ian McEwan. It features a few of his regular tropes, as well, to make it a pleasant mish-mash of some things that have featured in his stories before now. There's the naivety of someone – anyone – setting out in love, for one, a case of historical sex being the crux of one story strand, and heck, even Chesil Beach gets a name-check. But it's all perfectly new, eminently enjoyable, and of course highly intelligent. It's a story that's been wrung out of all opportunity to discuss AI 'life', nature/nurture debates and the parental urge, and to shine lights on our 2020. And all of that is here with not a clunky mis-step, or a forced bit of soap-boxing, but because they're intrinsic parts of this drama. I'm not sure where some of the political scenes were supposed to be going, spreading away from the particular butterfly wing-flaps that caused the background to this story, but I did like the rest of my time with these pages a lot – for all it reflected back to McEwan of old, and even for how much of it might be old hat to sci-fi's regular readers, it was still a cerebral page-turner. Four and a half stars.

Set in an alternate and slightly strange version of the 1980s, Ian McEwan's latest novel raises some important questions many of which we as are society are starting to ask ourselves. It delves into the nuances of emotion, how theoretically you could programme emotions humans feel into sentient beings using highly advanced maths algorithms.

If you are into books that make you think, then this one to read,

I’m afraid I didn’t think Machines Like Me was all that good. It had its moments, but I wasn’t sure quite what it was trying to achieve, and in the end I was rather glad to have finished it.

Ian McEwan has been very ambitious here, but for me that ambition stretches in too many directions and doesn’t really succeed in any of them. There is a promising central theme of the difference between a form of consciousness based on extremely complex mathematical algorithms and human consciousness with its almost infinite nuance and subtlety. The difficulty of coping with human relationships without that nuance and without it also to ward off the sense of the ultimate futility of existence is quite well done – but it’s swamped by so many extraneous stories. The background of an alternate history, set in the early 80s seemed pointless to me and a major distraction as it made endless but rather unconvincing political points and McEwan’s digressions into all sorts of tangentially related subjects just seemed rather show-offy to me. Add to this some more distracting and somewhat clumsy points in an implausible adoption story and so on and it all became a bit of an amorphous mess, I’m afraid.

It’s very well written, of course and it had enough about it to keep me reading to the end (with a little judicious skimming) so I’ve rounded 2.5 stars up to 3, but I can only give this a bery qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)

As always with McEwan, this is packed with interesting ideas: sentient AI, the illogical logic of human emotions, the 'robot' that has an existential crisis, the creepy/sexy/downright weird love triangle. Thing is, the book isn't content with mining these issues: it overloads with an alternative 1980s history, a secrets-and-lies crime story, a peculiar adopt-a-child-met-in-the-park subplot - and the whole thing implodes as a result. I wish this had concentrated on the surprisingly melancholy story of Adam and his relationships to Charlie and Miranda (another unsubtly over-determined name, btw) - a fabulous premise gets diluted with too much unnecessary busyness and misses out on what could have been haunting and provocative.

I'll be first to admit that this isn't my usual genre but I was intrigued by the premise. I've also just read Jeanette Winterson's excellent 'Frankisstein' which explores many of the same ethical concerns as this book, so was interested to compare the ideas.

The book is set in a strange alternate 'what if' 1980s where Alan Turing lived and worked on cutting edge technology. The story's protagonist buys an 'Adam' robot, an incredibly lifelike human robot with advanced artificial intelligence. Together with his girlfriend Miranda, the pair have to navigate the various moral questions thrown up by owning something that seems so human.

I thought that the book raised lots of really interesting ideas and I did find it very thought-provoking, especially as our own world appears to be on the cusp of facing some of these theoretical problems for real. However, I was not a big fan of the writing style as I found it weirdly cold and clinical. A terrible confession for an English teacher, but this is the first McEwan book I've read so I'm not sure if this is his usual style.

I'd recommend this to people interested in the ethics around AI; it puts a relatable face on to the whole debate by making it about one man, one woman and one robot! An interesting read but, on balance, not as engaging for me personally as the Winterson book.