And he makes very bad decisions with distressing regularity, like spending all 86,000 British pounds of his inheritance on one of the first “Adams” to hit the market.

He pines for inscrutable Miranda, who lives upstairs. Ultimately, it asks a surprisingly mournful question: If we built a machine that could look into our hearts, could we really expect it to like what it sees?Ĭharlie Friend’s life is a bare cupboard at the outset of “Machines.” He makes an almost-living playing the stock and currency markets from his shabby London apartment. “Machines” is a sharp, unsettling read, which - despite its arteries being clogged with research and back story - has a lot on its mind about love, family, jealousy and deceit. Yet he’s such a masterly writer of prose and provocative thinker of thoughts that even his lesser novels leave marks. It is not the first, or even the 10th, place to start reading McEwan if you’ve never encountered him before. “Machines Like Me” conjures a love triangle between a floundering Brit named Charlie Friend, a secretive doctoral student named Miranda and a replicant named Adam. We still read him not for comfort, but dread. But McEwan’s characters still tend to be dangerously un-self-aware and headed toward nothing good. He’s a far more cerebral writer now, as well as a more humanist one. It’s been 40 years since the author made his name ( and his nickname “Ian Macabre”) by rolling grenades about thrill kills, incest and dismemberment into what he regarded as the polite, heat-drowsy garden party of contemporary British fiction. Ian McEwan’s latest novel asks if the manufacture of synthetic humans would spark enlightenment and ease or fractiousness and pain - but, come on, it’s obviously not going to be pretty, because which part of “Ian McEwan novel” do you not understand?

MACHINES LIKE ME by McEwan Ian