Tag Archives: Ian McEwan

#BookReview ‘Machines Like Me’ by Ian McEwan #literary #AI #scifi

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Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan is an awkward book to review. Some elements jarred and dragged me off the page but curiosity drove me on to the end. When I finished it I realised I felt let down because I’d been waiting for a twist that didn’t come. Ultimately this book is out of the same drawer as Nutshell, a single clever premise which promises more. Ian McEwanCharlie works from home, living in a rented flat, making money by dealing money online. From a distance, he loves his upstairs neighbour Miranda. They are brought together by Charlie’s purchase of a robot; synthetically human, the male robot is one of the very first batch commercially available. Miranda agrees to ‘share’ him. Once Adam is plugged in and charging, his personality can be selected online. Charlie and Miranda share this equally, neither knowing what features the other selected. Adam is part child, part flatmate, soon co-worker and asker of awkward questions. He also becomes an inconvenient love rival. As Charlie and Miranda share the ownership of Adam, in parallel they also become involved in the life of a neglected human child, Mark, first encountered in a local playground.
The setting is an alternative world. It is the 1980s. Britain lost the Falklands War, Alan Turing lives on, the internet exists and everyone has mobile phones. I admit to finding the alternative world rather jarring and kept pausing to take in the random turns of history. I’m not convinced this added to the plot about artificial intelligence and its impact on humans – would the book be stronger if it was set today?
Written in the first person, we are limited to Charlie’s take on the world. I would like to have heard the voices of Miranda and Adam too. The first 50 pages are a slow read as the alternative world is established. Then as the story progresses, I was waiting for the twist; the cover blurb promises that Miranda lives with a terrible secret. But when the secret is revealed – by Adam, who does his detective work at night by searching online databases – it was not what I expected. I had been harbouring suspicions that Miranda was really a female version of Adam, an Eve.
Ultimately it is a story of truth and lies, and where the line of loyalty begins and ends. Ultimately it is the robot which asks difficult questions the humans cannot live up to. His is a straightforward right/wrong approach to  moral questions with no space of white lies or unspoken truths. Towards the end Charlie says, ‘I was responsible for bringing this ambulant into our lives. To hate it was to hate myself.’ But the machine had already stepped across the line from ‘it’ to ‘him’.
A thought-provoking, flawed read.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Try these reviews of other McEwan novels:-
NUTSHELL
THE CHILDREN ACT

Read the first paragraph of THE CHILDREN ACT here

If you like this, try these:-
‘Summer House with Swimming Pool’ by Herman Koch
‘Butterfly on the Storm’ by Walter Lucius
‘Reservoir 13’ by Jon McGregor

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview MACHINES LIKE ME  by Ian McEwan https://wp.me/p5gEM4-47c via @Sandra Danby

Great Opening Paragraph 102… ‘The Cement Garden’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared with what followed. My sisters and I talked about him the week after he died, and Sue certainly cried when the ambulance men tucked him up in a bright-red blanket and carried him away. He was a frail, irascible, obsessive man with yellowish hands and face. I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.”
Ian McEwan From ‘The Cement Garden’ by Ian McEwan 

Read my reviews of these other novels by McEwan:-
MACHINES LIKE ME
NUTSHELL
THE CHILDREN ACT

And try two more McEwan #FirstParas:-
ENDURING LOVE
THE CHILDREN ACT

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier
‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ by Philippa Gregory
‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara THE CEMENT GARDEN by Ian McEwan http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2se via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Nutshell’ by Ian McEwan #crime

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I can see Nutshell by Ian McEwan occupying many inches of column space this autumn. Where to start? You must have heard by now that this is the one about the foetus who overhears his mother Trudy and her lover, her brother-in-law Claude, planning to murder Trudy’s husband and father of the narrator. Ian McEwanIt is both ingenious and awkward. At one moment I would chuckle at the audacity of the unborn narrator and his take on life, the next I was hit by a brick wall – how would a foetus know that? He is an incredibly sophisticated, philosophical, well-educated foetus. I’m sure I missed loads of literary references. McEwan covers this off very early by saying his mother, Trudy, listens to Radio 4 documentaries by day and mind-improving podcasts by night. I know the reader is expected to suspend disbelief, as we do in the theatre, the fourth wall and all that; but in Nutshell the fourth wall is more a flimsy partition.
Is it too clever? Perhaps. But the author is Ian McEwan whose books I love, so I was prepared to indulge him. At the back of my mind all the way through was, in this foetus an unreliable narrator? After all, he is blind, can’t touch or smell. He doesn’t know everything, although he talks as if he can. He can hear and taste – primarily his mother’s imbibing of red wine. But his take on life is limited and he is not privy to the workings of Trudy’s mind.
For many it will be a Marmite book, a love/hate thing. For me, the narrator’s voice got more sophisticated and all-seeing as the story went on and it began to grate. I read on because I wanted to know who died in the end.

Try these reviews of other McEwan novels:-
MACHINES LIKE ME
THE CHILDREN ACT

Read the first paragraph of these McEwan books:-
ENDURING LOVE
THE CHILDREN ACT
THE CEMENT GARDEN

If you like this, try these:-
‘Elizabeth is Missing’ by Emma Healey
‘A Fatal Crossing’ by Tom Hindle
‘Butterfly on the Storm’ by Walter Lucius

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview NUTSHELL by Ian McEwan via @Sandra Danby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2aR

Great Opening Paragraph 89… ‘The Children Act’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise longue, staring past her stockinged feet towards the end of the room, towards a partial view of recessed bookshelves by the fireplace and, to one side, by a tall window, a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for fifty pounds. Probably a fake. Below it, centred on a round walnut table, a blue vase. No memory of how she came by it. Nor when she last put flowers in it. The fireplace not lit in a year. Blackened raindrops falling irregularly into the grate with a ticking sound against balled-up yellowing newsprint. A Bokhara rug spread on wide polished floorboards. Looming at the edge of vision, a baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black whine. On the floor by the chaise lounge, within her reach, the draft of a judgment. And Fiona was on her back, wishing all this stuff at the bottom of the sea.”
Ian McEwan From ‘The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan 

Here’s my review of THE CHILDREN ACT and these other McEwan novels:-
MACHINES LIKE ME
NUTSHELL

And try two more McEwan #FirstParas:-
ENDURING LOVE
THE CEMENT GARDEN

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘The Sea, The Sea’ by Iris Murdoch 
‘The Hunger Games’ by Suzanne Collins 
‘The God of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy 

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara THE CHILDREN ACT by Ian McEwan http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Vp via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan #contemporary #family

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The first page of this book by Ian McEwan is a classic, an intense study of Fiona Maye, High Court judge, a family law specialist, married, childless. The Children Act is the story of a slice of her life and how an upset with her husband coincides with a particular case. Each event impacts on the other and I was left considering how our legal system expects consistent wisdom from its judges when they have human frailties. Ian McEwan Before the story starts, there is a quotation from the Children Act, the piece of law according to which Judge Maye must compose her judgements: ‘When a court determines any question with respect to… the upbringing of a child… the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.’ But for Fiona Maye, her involvement with this case goes beyond the courtroom.
Adam is a teenager whose religious upbringing prevents him having a blood transfusion as part of his treatment for leukaemia. Fiona Maye routinely moves from one case to the next, digesting complicated information in an efficient, calm and clinical manner, but something about Adam’s situation is different. Her judgement will effectively decide if Adam shall live or die. She doesn’t know it, but it will also have implications for her own life. Is her decision affected by the fact that, nearing sixty, she is starting to feel her childlessness? As she hides from the stress of her husband’s departure in search of sexual adventure, she buries herself in her documents, in Adam’s case. Does personal judgement combine with her judicial process? Doesn’t it always?
This is a slim book about a difficult subject. McEwan writes without a spare word but his prose is more emotional and intense because of that. He concentrates on the two storylines – Adam’s medical situation, and Fiona’s separation from her husband – without extraneous detail about Fiona’s life. The legal case is set out somewhat drily, but then the law is dry. This is not a John Grisham legal thriller, it is a considered fictional examination of what it is like for a lawmaker to sit in judgement while at the same time retaining the humanity which qualified the judge for the job in the first place.
This cover is my hardback version, a Christmas 2014 gift which has been languishing on my shelf until a friend asked me for my opinion. Why did I wait so long to pick it up?

Read the first paragraph of THE CHILDREN ACT here

Try these reviews of other McEwan novels:-
MACHINES LIKE ME
NUTSHELL

If you like this, try:-
‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara
‘The Signature of All Things’ by Elizabeth Gilbert
‘The House at the Edge of the World’ by Julia Rochester

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE CHILDREN ACT by IAN MCEWAN via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1RB

Great Opening Paragraph… 47

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ian McEwan - enduring love 10-6-13“The beginning is simple to mark. We were in sunlight under a turkey oak, partly protected from a strong, gusty wind. I was kneeling on the grass with a corkscrew in my hand, and Clarissa was passing me the bottle – a 1987 Daumas Gassac. This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man’s shout. We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running towards it. The transformation was absolute: I don’t recall dropping the corkscrew, or getting to my feet, or making a decision, or hearing the caution Clarissa called after me. What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak. There was the shout again, and a child’s cry, enfeebled by the wind that roared in the tall trees along the hedgerows. I ran faster. And there, suddenly, from different points around the field, four other men were converging on the scene, running like me.”
‘Enduring Love’ by Ian McEwan

Great Opening Paragraph 47… ‘Enduring Love’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“The beginning is simple to mark. We were in sunlight under a turkey oak, partly protected from a strong, gusty wind. I was kneeling on the grass with a corkscrew in my hand, and Clarissa was passing me the bottle – a 1987 Daumas Gassac. This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man’s shout. We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running towards it. The transformation was absolute: I don’t recall dropping the corkscrew, or getting to my feet, or making a decision, or hearing the caution Clarissa called after me. What idiocy, to be racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak. There was the shout again, and a child’s cry, enfeebled by the wind that roared in the tall trees along the hedgerows. I ran faster. And there, suddenly, from different points around the field, four other men were converging on the scene, running like me.”
Ian McEwanFrom ‘Enduring Love’ by Ian McEwan

Read my reviews of these other novels by McEwan:-
MACHINES LIKE ME
NUTSHELL
THE CHILDREN ACT

And try two more McEwan #FirstParas:-
THE CEMENT GARDEN
THE CHILDREN ACT

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Divisadero’ by Michael Ondaatje
‘Possession’ by AS Byatt
‘That They May Face The Rising Sun’ by John McGahern

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara ENDURING LOVE by Ian McEwan http://wp.me/p5gEM4-mr via @SandraDanby