Speak
Louisa Hall
Ecco Press
Speak’s web of interrelated narratives features a 17th century pilgrim, a paralysed girl conversing with a chatbot, a fictionalised Alan Turing, and an imprisoned AI inventor in the year 2040. Comparisons to Cloud Atlas are to be expected, but Louisa Hall is unconcerned with politics and uninterested in stylistic innovation, resulting in a more accessible, though less stimulating, read.
The epistolary format doesn’t work for all the stories, with the strained letters between the Dettmans – a ponytailed computer science professor who eventually turns against AIs and his wife, who becomes enamoured with one – suffering in particular. In these letters, stray ponderings on, say, the politicisation of women’s novels (‘Students barely skim what she wrote, then pen inflamed essays about marginalization, and amid all the shouting, she still falls silent.’) are shoved aside with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball, to make way for yet more awkward exposition. However, when Hall hits her stride, she is both funny and touching. The charming diary of Mary, a 13-year-old girl traveling from England to the New World, provides one of the book’s strongest sections. ‘Have decided to write in style of Sir William Leslie, favorite adventurer’, she ventures optimistically, before realising that the diary was offered by her father as an apology for her impending arranged marriage.
Speak may be an uneven novel, but its shortcomings are easy to forgive.
Words: Eliza A. Kalfa
