Henry wakes with a jolt on Halloween morning in “William,” Mason Coile’s “debut” (it’s Canadian writer Andrew Pyper’s first book under that pen name).
What’s that thing in the attic? Oh, just an AI robot that will probably take over your life.
FICTION: Contemporary novel “William” takes inspiration from Mary Shelley’s classic “Frankenstein.”
The Minnesota Star Tribune
September 3, 2024 at 12:30PM
“You were nightmaring,” his pregnant wife, Lily, says from a chair next to his bed. “You woke up like I fired a gun next to your ear.”
“Did you?” he asks.
Henry and Lily are engineers. He specializes in robotics, she in computers. He’s agoraphobic and she is not. Their differences are causing strain in their marriage: “At some point along the way they agreed to their casting: he’s the socially awkward nerd with untreated neuroses, she’s the business savant sitting on millions but restless for more.”
Together (barely) they live in a Victorian house that’s been turned into a smart home with all the bells and whistles, where pretty much nothing opens, closes or turns on or off without a voice command. And there’s a lab in the attic, where Henry is secretly creating an artificially intelligent robot he has named William.
“William” is an AI Frankenstein tale, you are probably thinking, and you wouldn’t be wrong. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Henry and Henry Frankenstein, what Mary Shelley’s mad scientist is called in the 1931 movie, share a name (“Victor” would have been too on the nose). Pyper is, after all, the man who wrote “The Demonologist,” in which a specialist in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” must use his expertise to rescue his daughter, who is stuck in the underworld. Pyper’s alter ego Coile is no stranger to literary allusion, either, it appears.
In fact, Henry dreams in Goethe, although he doesn’t recognize it. He describes to Lily the part of his “nightmaring” in which he hears a voice paraphrasing Mephistopheles in Goethe’s “Faust”: “I am the spirit of perpetual negation. For all things that exist deserve to perish.”
“You remembered that?” she says.
“I guess it was memorable,” he replies.
As is this compact work. The alternating short and shorter chapters keep the action tearing along, rather like cuts in a movie, as the temerity to meddle with existence undoes most of the characters. Coile/Pyper toys with heavy ideas about responsibility; the mechanics of escape (I thought for sure a character trapped in a shower stall with the water running was going to drown — you know that old setup, head close to the ceiling, trying to breathe in the last bits of air before succumbing — but I was oh so thankfully wrong), and the notion of the Uncanny Valley, the phenomenon of disquiet in the face of humanlike objects that aren’t quite realistic. Is it the absence of something that creates the dissonance or is it the presence of something evil?
By the end of “William” you will know the answer. And then you’ll want to read it again.
William
By: Mason Coile.
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 224 pages, $27.
St. Paul writer Kao Kalia Yang has won four Minnesota Book Awards and was recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.
