Children and teenagersReviewHaig's first teen fiction novel shows that androids have feelings, tooMatt Haig's literary scope is uncommonly wide, ranging from darkly brilliant books for younger children – the twisted Dahlian fable Shadow Forest is a gem – to accessible but still risk-taking fiction for adults. He has recast Shakespeare's Henry IV as shaggy dog story and shifted Hamlet to a pub in Newark-on-Trent.
Despite the ambitious formal range of his writing, Haig's focus is rather narrow. He returns time and again to a few central philosophical questions: What is it to be human? How should we behave? Why can't we just, well, love each other a bit more? He shows us to ourselves slantwise, through the eyes of a dog, a cat, an alien, or a family of relatively domesticated vampires.
Haig's moral seriousness – his willingness to grapple with those big themes – combined with his formal playfulness and a certain outsider chic, make his work highly attractive to young adult readers, yet he hasn't, hitherto, written explicitly for teenagers.
It's a gap in his CV that he fills here with some aplomb. Echo Boy is an exciting SF thriller, but also a rich and deeply felt exploration of the line that separates humans – creatures of love, passion, fear and hate – from mere organic simulations.
We are in familiar territory. The future is dominated by big corporations – especially the two hi-tech monsters, Castle Industries and Sempura. It's not quite a dystopia, but things are far from well. Global warming has left half the world scorched, and half drowned. The police and politicians are in the pockets of the oligarchs. The rich reside in mansions protected by robot dogs, and the poor live in floating slums. Much of the manual work and most domestic drudgery is performed by humanoid robots, each generation of which has grown a little more refined, a little more human, than the last. The latest are called Echos (Enhanced Computerised Humanoid Organisms) – physically perfect but not yet imbued with emotions.
The story is told through the alternating voices of 15-year-old Audrey, and Daniel, the eponymous Echo Boy. Audrey's pleasant life is shattered when her techno-refusnik parents are murdered by what appears to be a malfunctioning Echo.
Audrey manages to escape to the refuge of her uncle Alex, who happens to be the head of Castle Industries. Daniel is one of his domestic Echoes. Gradually we learn more of Daniel's history. He is no ordinary android. His creator included a single hair from her dead infant in his makeup. This is sufficient to nudge him beyond the barrier that separates human from machine. He becomes the first Echo to feel pain – and love. The romance between Audrey and Daniel is faltering, uncertain, awkward – like any teen romance. It's also fraught with danger. It comes as little surprise to find out that Alex Castle is no sort of protector: a ruthless megalomaniac, he'll go to any lengths to protect his company and crush the opposition.
Of all genres, science fiction is the one most woven from other texts – necessarily so, as the future it postulates exists only in words and ideas. And so Echo Boy is itself rich with echoes: Blade Runner is an obvious reference point, but I was also struck by the links to Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Much of the set-up takes us back, rather than forward, into the world of gothic romance. The orphaned heroine, the sinister uncle who provides apparent protection and real menace, the house full of mysteries - these are the staples of gothic fiction from Anne Radcliffe to Sheridan Le Fanu. And of course any book that focuses on the creation of life must always tip its hat to Mary Shelley.
That is not to say that Echo Boy is derivative; rather, it rightfully finds its place as a synapse in the huge neural network of speculative fiction. Ultimately, its truths are not speculative, but return us to the central facts of our lives: the search for love, the need to connect, the quest for freedom.
Anthony McGowan's most recent novels are Brock and Hello Darkness.
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