Rating: 3/5
Review
Hard going
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.)
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