Service Model

"I’m not sure I see Charles as rebellious – it’s just obeying its programming. (Have you read The Good Soldier Švejk, where the main character keeps getting into trouble for obeying orders?) Charles is a robot valet, whose master has died; in fact Charles may have murdered him. Hmm, I guess that’s rebellious! Charles first has to negotiate the medical and police services and then the fact that it is unemployed. It spends the rest of the novel trying to find a new master. There’s a curious collision between Charles’s seemingly reasonable logic and the rather colder logics of the organisations it encounters. There’s also a sense of anger peppering the novel. I got in trouble about fifteen years ago when I said that I thought it was hard for a comic novel to win the award – The Guardian twisted this into my dismissing Terry Pratchett , whose novels I love. Humorous books can make profound points, but if you say that then you risk ending up in Pseud’s Corner for spoiling the joke. Glancing through nearly forty years of shortlists, it’s hard to spot that many comedies. Venomous Lumpsucker is very funny at times, and there’s been a thread of satire and black humour over the decades. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars leaps from comic moments to making you cry or provoking anger. Several of the shortlist made me chuckle, but that could just be me. I suspect that Tchaikovsky is looking to Douglas Adams as well as to Franz Kafka and it wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t some Tom Stoppard in the mix. And there’s John Sladek’s Roderick/Roderick at Random from the early 1980s, which is another novel about a robot stuck in a maze of logic taken to absurdity."