Review: Speak

Speak by Louisa Hall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Speak" by Louisa Hall immediately calls to mind "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell. Like "Cloud Atlas," "Speak" is a novel told in parts by 6 different narrators throughout time. The earliest narrator here lives in the 1600s and the latest lives around 2050. Most of the narrators are involved in the creation of artificial intelligence - or at least an advanced chat-bot program - and the relationships between speech and true communication and intelligence are a major concern of the novel.

Our narrators are:
Eva, a discarded, highly-advanced robot with an exceptional conversational program based on the early chat-bot program called MARY. All of the other characters' stories are framed as texts that have been input into her program, part of her index that she references when communicating.

Mary, a young girl from the 1600s who is traveling from England to America with her parents, her dog, and her future husband. We read excerpts from her journal, written in the style of her favorite adventure writer.

Alan Turing, concerned over the health of his best friend but excited about the project they're working on: the early version of a computer. He writes to his best friend's mother throughout the course of their lives.

Karl Dettman, the computer scientist circa the 60s who programmed MARY, but refuses to give it the capacity for long-term memory despite his wife's insistence. We read his letter-like journal entries, addressed to his wife.

Ruth Dettman, wife of Karl Dettman, who studies Mary's journal and reads it to MARY. Like Karl, she is Jewish and from Germany, and narrowly avoided the Holocaust. We don't see her perspective until halfway through the book - it is much later in her life, and she is looking back on her time with Karl via letters (seemingly unsent) to him.

Stephen Chinn, creator of the babybots: realistic baby dolls equipped with his own special version of MARY and given to young girls, who become unhealthily attached to the dolls. He is in jail for his actions and writing a memoir, circa 2050.

Gaby and MARY2, a chat transcript (submitted as evidence in Chinn's trial) between one of the girls who was devastated by the confiscation of her babybot and subsequently afflicted with some sort of psychosomatic disease, and the chat-bot version of the program that ran the babybots' conversations.

Eva, who it appears is Gaby's former babybot, ties the novel together. She and the other confiscated babybots (so removed because they were deemed too humanlike and a danger to children's health) are being shipped off to warehouses to die, and she looks back on the voices programmed into her and the rest of the dolls, searching for words to describe her life, to communicate with someone - perhaps the other dolls, but since they all clamor at each other, all of them speaking and none listening, it seems like she's searching for someone to listen, as well. She says, many times, that she speaks but does not understand the words. This is something many characters, Karl Dettman, Stephen Chinn, and even the chat-bots themselves included, repeat about the various MARY/chat-bot incarnations: they can speak, but not understand. Dettman's refusal to program MARY with memory is ostensibly not because he worries she will eventually understand (though Ruth believes that he does fear it), but because the people who speak to her - including his wife - will be tricked, will think the bots understand. This fear is made manifest with the babybots; the young children who own them refer to themselves as parents, the babybots as their best friends.

The novel's greatest success is in hitting home how little (or how much) we can understand about other humans through their words and how perhaps, then, the way people in their daily lives define humanity or intelligence or communication is not by whether the speaker knows what they're saying, but how the words are perceived or understood. The problem with chat-bots and babybots becomes not when they don't mean what they say, but when they cannot provide meaning to what the humans say to them - when they can't truly understand.

Mary's best friend is a dog, and she claims he understands her the way no one else can, but he can't speak. Are we to say that emotional connection isn't real, that there isn't communication happening there? She is initially cold to her future husband but once she has reached a point where she's willing to listen to what he says from a generous, understanding perspective (because he has been saying kind things to her throughout and she continually rejects him out of hand), she begins to accept and love him. It's the meaning she takes from the words that matters, not the words he says, that makes her see him as a person.

Stephen Chinn creates an algorithm for dating based on conversational patterns that always works - until everyone uses it, and then it's not the words that matter, but the structure they take. He makes people into chat-bots, teaches them to fill in whatever response seems most appropriate without regard to the content. And his success in love comes when he breaks that mold, learns Spanish to talk to his cleaning lady, and tells her stories about himself. He wants her to understand him, so he breaks the language barrier and makes sure the content matters. Not all the stories are true, some are fanciful, but she understands the meaning behind them, and sees him as a person. And he creates the babybots for his daughter, who has grown up rather isolated and speaks her own idiosyncratic language, so she can have someone who understands her.

Karl and Ruth Dettman are the source of the most poignant emotional scenes of the novel. I cried several times at the emotional weight and complexity and beauty of their loss. Karl writes to Ruth that he knows he is losing her, that he wants her to open up to him, that he wishes he could remember their past the way she does, that he understands her needs but is failing to communicate it. He thinks she spends so much time with MARY and wants the program to have memory because he doesn't remember, and she wants the computer to fill that need. Ruth, in her old age, writes to him that she misses him, but never felt like he was listening to what she was saying. And then, in Ruth's final letter, she tells him she is still inputting text to Eva, and she inputs what, she says, she remembers him saying to her when he thought she was asleep, word-for-word. These are Karl's letters, the ones we read in the first half of the book. At this point, we are forced to ask: are those Karl's words? Is Ruth remembering, 20-30 years later, exactly what he said? Or is she telling herself-Eva-us what she wanted him to say, or what she thinks he would have said, if he had spoken? In the end, we can't know. But it is what Ruth thinks he said, or what she wanted him to have said, and what matters is that (whether he spoke or not) she understood him as trying to reach out, to understand, to communicate, but failing to speak. Their relationship's dissolution was not, as 'Karl's' letters indicate he thought, because he failed to remember their traumatic history or understand Ruth's feelings, but because he failed to speak to her about it. This casts Ruth's relationship with MARY in a different light - she spoke with MARY not because she hoped MARY (unlike Karl) would remember, but because MARY (unlike Karl) spoke to her. Here, the speech act itself is what's necessary for communication, not the intention behind it - Ruth understands Karl though he doesn't speak to her, but she needs him to try to speak to her at all, like MARY does. (Ruth doesn't seem to send her letters to Karl in the end; instead, having written out all 'his' letters, she returns home, finally at peace with her life, so perhaps she is merely writing to communicate to herself why she has been unhappy.)

Gaby and MARY2 provide the sterling example of why computers and chat-bots ultimately, occasionally, may fail to truly communicate, and it's when they are on the receptive end of the communication. Gaby sees the ocean for the first time and tells MARY2 in Gaby's only expansive, descriptive block of text. It's a fully sensorial experience, something MARY2 can't understand in a deep, meaningful way, since she has no senses. This brings to mind the classic philosophical thought experiment about Mary and the black and white room: Mary is a scientist who studies color. She knows everything there is to know, factually, about the color red, but has lived all her life in a black-and-white room and has never seen the color red. If Mary finally steps out of the room and sees a red apple, has she learned something new about the color red? It seems in this novel, she has, and that the chat-bots with no sensorial experience cannot truly understand Gaby's moving letter. This leaves open the question, though, of the realm of emotional experience, and of the baby-bots who appear to have sensory receptors. I don't think the novel answers conclusively whether the babybots have understanding, or whether chat-bots can understand emotions. Eva, it appears, searches for words to describe her feelings, and though she falls back on the words of others, those feelings exist.

Even the format of the novel contributes to this theme: each of these are written (or, in Eva's case, spoken) accounts of lives. Mary is constantly unsure who she is writing to, writing for. God? Her dog? But it seems she is writing to understand herself; she chooses her writing style to imitate her favorite adventure novelist, because she wants to see herself as an adventurer on her trip to America. Chinn is writing so the world understands why he did what he did. The Dettmans' letters are attempts to make the other understand, or at least Ruth's attempts. But they are all fictional. They only exist as the reader (or, within the text, as Eva) parses them. All Eva has is the words of others, the words of the people in this novel. If the reader is supposed to read these select words, selected from her entire database, as conveying Eva's feelings, then perhaps Eva does understand. Either way, both Eva and the texts themselves convey to the reader an understanding; the reader finds meaning in the words, the reader creates these (fictional) people to correspond to the words, the reader understands.

The novel has one large narrative flaw: everything is written in first-person retrospective. All the characters are looking back on incidents that have already occurred (and often refer to past events in other characters' tales). This takes a lot of the momentum from the story. I'll admit I was often bored. There is no mystery, no narrative tension. The reader knows or can easily deduce what happens for every character fairly quickly, with one remarkable exception, mentioned above. Most of the stories lack their own exposition-rising action-climax-falling action and are simply flat re-tellings of life events. Hall's prose saves the novel, but this could go from 'pretty good' to 'amazing' with some kind of narrative structure spanning more of the individual stories or a substantial arc tying the stories together. Turing could (and I'd say should) have easily been cut from the novel, as his contributions to the creation of computers are peripheral to the AI discussion, because his story is almost entirely biographical, because all dramatic tension in his story ends in his second or third letter, and because his story contributes little to the themes of the novel. And because three of the threads of this story are about old male computer scientists who are unlucky in love and his, as written, is the least compelling. Gaby's conversations with MARY2 are especially flat, existing just to give more information about the world in 2050, but at least provide an emotional climax that is essential to the novel's thesis on speech.

I feel parts of my argument here are a bit muddled, and welcome any contributions.

And one final opinion: no one should ever be allowed to name a female robot (especially one of the first female robots in whatever world) Eve or Eva or any variation on that again. It's tired. It was tired decades ago.

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