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.
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