MixedFinancial Times\"If McEwan does not have Don DeLillo’s genius for making technical jargon sing, he knows when to leaven it with a joke ... In fact, McEwan knows all the novelistic rules: of pace, of scene-staging, of when to withhold and when to release information. This is a book you can set your watch to ... Such is his command of the plumbing and architecture of fiction, you forgive the occasional bloodlessness. The central characters in Machines Like Me become emotional — including the android — but never as emotional as the circumstances seem to demand. There are lapses into prim, Famous Five-ish dialogue when things get heated ... As so often in McEwan’s recent work, the reader is spoilt by his technical mastery, if never quite moved by it ... The resulting novels shimmer with relevance, which is not quite the same as an absolute need to be written. It is certainly not the same as permanence.\
