Android Karenina

Ben H Winters and Leo Tolstoy

Quirk

Otago Daily Times, August 28th 2010

“Functioning robots are all alike; every malfunctioning robot malfunctions in its own way.”

With these words, Ben Winters abandons his former muse, Ms Austen, for Mr Tolstoy to bring us a tragic story of love, loss and robots in 19th-century Russia.

The basic structure and characters of Tolstoy’s great novel remain: the passionate affair between Anna Karenina and the dashing Alexei Vronsky, Konstantin Levin’s discovery of the happiness and philosophical transcendence family life can bring, Anna’s social ostracisation and eventual, despairing suicide.

This is not, however, the agrarian Russia of the original but a technologically advanced society in which machines, not peasants, allow the upper classes to enjoy a life of luxury and ease. Thanks to the discovery of an element called groznium, robots do everything from telling the time to raising the children, while every respectable adult has a Class III “beloved companion” to serve, advise and accompany them in every aspect of their lives.

Their comfortable existence is under threat on multiple fronts, however. Anna’s husband, Alexei Karenin, is planning to return the Russian people to a position of dignity and self-sufficiency by purging the country of all technological aid and reverting to the traditions of serfdom and authoritarian government.

Meanwhile, there is an ongoing guerrilla war waged against the Ministry by renegade scientists who want robots to be left to evolve naturally into self-determining beings rather than items of property. And there are the Honoured Guests, aliens who, to the great surprise of the xenotheologists who have long anticipated their arrival, turn out to be monsters intent on conquering Earth. Scientologists be warned.

At one level, the additions work well. Winters mimics Tolstoy’s themes and style cleverly, from authorial philosophising to self-justifying interior monologues. The intellectual arguments between those who support the old ways and proponents of Western technology and democracy is neatly inverted, and the analogue of Karenin’s surrender to spiritualism in the original novel is his subjugation to the Class III robot that takes him over both physically and mentally.Anna and Vronsky’s surrender of their Class IIIs in the hopes of returning to official favour contrasts with Levin and Kitty’s attempt to protect and hide their “beloved companions”.

In these respects, Android Karenina fulfils the publisher’s goals to “enhance the world’s greatest novels with appropriate, hilarious, and frightening additions that heighten the reader’s experience and further emphasise the novel’s original themes”. Personally, however, I think it is a cynical, money-making gimmick. While this book will certainly be read by many people who would never touch the straight version, I’m not sure that such subtleties will be appreciated without prior knowledge of the social, cultural and historical context in which Tolstoy was writing.

Although while the robotic makeover was amusing enough, I couldn’t help feeling Winters is trying too hard. Nothing is left untouched. A skating rink can’t contain ordinary ice, it must have a magnetised track traversed by electromagnetic skates. A ballroom must waft dancers to the ceiling. Anna must be literally shot down when she ventures back into society…

Maybe I’m just taking it all too seriously but, as with the Austen mash-ups, reading Anna Karenina has driven me back to the original novel. Then again, maybe I am merely displaying my literary pretentiousness. Perhaps this is what the publishers intended in the first place.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/reboot-cynical-money-making-gimmick