The Nature of Things

In his latest book, Machines Like Me , Ian McEwan gives us a bit of alternative history, a bit of science fiction, and wraps it all up in a unique menage a trois love story featuring a fully-functional humanoid robot named Adam. In the world of this novel, Alan Turing did not die in 1954; he is still alive in the London of the 1980s, and, having been knighted by the queen, he lives openly with his longtime partner and is contributing to the advancement of computer technology and artificial intelligence. He is a much-honored member of society whose work during World War II and later is recognized for the world-changing event that it was. And Turing is the idolized hero of Charlie Friend, one of the main characters in this story. Charlie leads a rather drab existence in which he makes a living - sort of - by playing the stock and currency markets. He lives in a shabby apartment and pines for the woman who lives upstairs, an enigma named Miranda. He is also obsessed with robots, and when ...

Let's admit right up front that Michael Beard is a thoroughly unlikable, even despicable, character. He is selfish, self-absorbed, insincere, apparently incapable of honestly caring for another human being. When we meet him, he is on his fifth marriage and every one of them has been marked by his constant infidelities which were the causes of the endings of the first four.  Uniquely, in his fifth marriage, when his wife learns of his philandering, instead of screaming and crying and demanding a divorce, she cheerfully takes that knowledge as a license to take her own lovers. Which she does. And, of course, Michael cannot tolerate that. What's sauce for the gander is most definitely not sauce for the goose in his world. Michael Beard was at one time a world class physicist. He had even won the Nobel Prize for his work. But that was years ago. These days he's simply coasting on his reputation, delivering speeches for pay and lending his name to be used on letterheads of vario...

"God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually." - from Nutshell And eventually, luckily for us, there was Ian McEwan, a writer who routinely delivers such lyrical prose that a dedicated reader could weep for pure joy. In Nutshell , he's done it again. How can one adequately describe this weird and wonderful little novel? The plot is based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, but our narrator is an eighth-month fetus, preternaturally aware and attuned to the ways of the world. He resides "upside down in a woman" and is privy to all that the woman is privy to, including the plot devised by her and her lover (her brother-in-law) to kill her husband, our narrator's father. McEwan's tale is essentially a two-hundred page soliloquy by that fetus as he watches in horror as their plan proceeds. It is absurd but dazzlingly imaginative and clever and somehow manages to be both suspenseful and profound. It is philosophical in range, in its view of a world ...

The Children Act by Ian McEwan My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Children Act is a part of the regulations governing the judicial process in family law in the courts of England. Its overarching principle is that judicial decisions should always be in the best interests of the child. This is the principle which guides the thinking and the acts of Fiona Maye, a High Court judge in London, who presides over family court cases. She is fifty-nine years old and has devoted her life to the law. She has held her position for a long time and is well-respected by her colleagues as being fiercely intelligent and deeply immersed in the nuances of her chosen field of the law, as well as thoroughly dedicated to that well-known overarching principle. Though a champion on behalf of children's welfare, Fiona has no children of her own. In their busy professional lives, she and her long-time husband, Jack, never had time for them. Jack is an academic, a professor and writer. They have many nieces and ne...