Benn refuses to have another referendum – “only the Third Reich and other tyrannies decided policy by plebiscites”, he says, “and generally no good came of them”. It’s telling that McEwan has a leftwing government taking Britain out of the EU, “a union that chiefly benefited large corporations”. There’s lashings of Jeremy Corbyn in the portrayal of Benn and his “band of Trotskyite followers”. Machines Like Me ramifies out from the specific challenges of AI to comment more broadly on the cost of progress, working through in its late-20th-century setting problems that we are still struggling with in the early 21st. It’s like Jules et Jim, if Jim were a robot. The narrative’s ebullient energy is drawn from the love triangle that forms between Charlie, his upstairs neighbour Miranda (her name just one of many references to The Tempest that thread through the book), and Adam, who has the air of a “Bosphorus dockworker”. Charlie, our likable, faintly useless hero, comes into some money on the death of his mother and buys one of these “synthetic humans”, a male called Adam (the Eves sold out immediately). Turing’s research, which he insists be made available open-source, has been employed to design androids that are able to pass for the humans who created them. On the streets of McEwan’s south London there are autonomous cars, while mobile phones and personal computers are more cutting-edge than our own nearly 40 years later. Supported by a series of colleagues from Francis Crick to Demis Hassabis (who appears to have been born a few decades early) to his lover, the theoretical physicist Tom Reah, Turing steers Britain into a technological future of extraordinary sophistication. Rather than the tragic facts of a brilliant life cut short by bigotry and the brutal “treatment” of his homosexuality, McEwan has Turing build on his code-cracking war work. The greatest tweak McEwan gives to history surrounds the figure of Alan Turing. These changes are there to illustrate an idea voiced by Charlie Friend, the book’s narrator, halfway through the novel: “The present is the frailest of improbable constructs.

In this alternative 1982, Britain has been humiliated in the South Atlantic, with 3,000 of its soldiers dead and the Argentinian junta jubilant Lennon and JFK are both alive Tony Benn is challenging Thatcher for the role of prime minister. Like the best counterfactual novels – and this one is up there with Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America – Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me is as much about the continuities it maintains as the skews it puts on history. The miners are on strike, unemployment is soaring and the headlines are dominated by Mrs Thatcher’s belligerent stance on the Falklands. T he year is 1982, although not quite as we knew it.

Machines like me by ian mcewan