The theme this time is artificial intelligence. We have a good enough idea now of what makes for McEwan territory that reports of a new novel from him make it hard to resist the question people used to ask of Anita Brookner: which one of the old ones is it? Machines Like Me shares with The Children Act and Enduring Love a punning title, to which, like the others, its plot earns it the right. But the products, easy to read, are just as easy to forget, leaving behind no more than a memory of a generically McEwan-esque plot of concealment, deception, and trauma, tinged always with a sense of the uncanny. They come, as he has put it, from his discovery of “how realism could be bolstered by the actual”. McEwan is a gifted enough craftsman for the novels to feel like real novels, not veiled essays. They have seemed like occasional writings, responses to current affairs and its “themes”: humanitarian intervention, blood transfusions for the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the CIA and the Cold War, climate change. The books have been getting thinner, and not just physically.

Ian McEwan’s literary production since his last really excellent book – Atonement, from 2001 – has shown a tendency to progressive emaciation.

Machines like me review