Jun 2019

This month, we are – for the first time – looking at a work of fiction. McEwan is a powerful author and in his latest book, he takes us back to an alternative 1980s London where Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.

The main protagonist, Charlie, is unemployed and drifting aimlessly through life. When he comes into some money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With the assistance of Miranda, the woman he is in love with, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever and a love triangle soon forms, confronting Adam (and the reader) with a profound moral dilemma.

This bold and unsettling novel presents us with fundamental questions about what makes us human and warns of the danger of inventing things beyond our control. This is a powerful piece of writing and the pleasure derived from enjoying the work of such a wonderful author is only tempered by the realisation that it is not entirely fictional. Charlie, Miranda and Adam sharing a drink: “We even raised a toast to ‘the future’, though his version of it, private mental space drowned by new technology in an ocean of collective thought, repelled us both.”

A fictional Alan Turing talking about the ‘machines’ understanding and consciousness: “And then they set about learning the lessons of despair we can’t help teaching them. At worst, they suffer a form of existential pain that becomes unbearable. At best, they or their succeeding generations will be driven by their anguish and astonishment to hold up a mirror to us. In it, we’ll see a familiar monster through the fresh eyes that we ourselves designed.”