For Emma by Ewan Morrison review: 'terrifying, astonishing and deeply human'

This disturbing glimpse into a sinister, AI-dominated future may be Ewan Morrison’s best novel to date, writes Allan Massie

"The Death of a child is the greatest reason of all to doubt the existence of God". It takes a bold novelist to preface his book with a quotation from Dostoevsky, for this invites comparison. Remarkably, Ewan Morrison's boldness is justified. If Dostoevsky had lived to be aware of artificial intelligence, he might have written something like For Emma. The novel is audacious, demanding, terrifying and yet also astonishing and deeply human. In this combination it also invites comparison with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In outline, though in nothing else, it is simple. An editor at a publishing house receives an email composed of 30 homemade videos. She senses danger, for it purports to be the work of a terrorist bomber. So she keeps it to herself, surely a mistake...

Ewan Morrison | Contributed

The videos, addressed by a man to his daughter, Emma, cover the last 30 days of his life, although as he recalls tales from her childhood it becomes clear that Emma is now dead. Emma was a genius, possessed since childhood of an insatiable curiosity. "Why, why, why"? she used to ask her father, “Pops”, about everything, every day.

Emma goes to Harvard aged just 16. Then, after a breakdown, she gets a job with a Big Tech company. Then an experiment goes wrong, she spends months in a coma and dies. Her father knows who he holds responsible: the CEO of Biosys. And so, in 30 days, when the man is scheduled to make a speech, he’ll hug a homemade bomb to himself and they'll both go.

Pops is himself in a mess, has been for years. After his wife left him, Emma was his hope, the light of his disordered life. Raised in a hippy commune, he suffers from deep depression, swallows pills by the handful and drinks vodka heavily. He speaks to the dead Emma and she speaks to him, her voice in his ear. Each daily video finds him in a worse state. You wonder if he can make it to the end. It is sad reading and compelling. We are on the verge of a new world, and there doesn't seem to be any place for humanity.

Pops deteriorates day by day. Sometimes Emma's voice deserts him, then returns more faintly. The tension grips. Can he make it to thee 30th day? Orwell's alternative title for his dystopian novel was The Last Man in Europe. It is hard at times not to see Pops, the suicide bomber, as the last hope for mankind. What he plans is appalling - if he gets that far - but the future and the snatches we are given of what it may be like are far more awful. Morrison has always been alert to paradox. Here, we have a hero who is mentally deranged and engaged on a terrible criminal venture; and yet his voice, no matter how disturbed and even demented, is perhaps the last voice for humanity.

This is a long novel, and as in all long novels there are a few moments when the narrative sags as Pops's mental disturbance and physical deterioration are repeatedly portrayed. But the slow pace is justified, and there are, as in all good novels, moments of humour, humour which, one fears, will be missing in the world Biosys will create.

Pops is a mess, but he is a mess we can understand as we can't understand scientists who would plant an alien device in a young woman's brain. At times this is a tender novel, and one in which the love between father and his destroyed daughter is wonderfully moving.

I've long thought Morrison the most interesting Scottish novelist of his generation - in fact, why stick at Scottish? - one who combines seriousness, awareness of a changing world, and has also the traditional qualities of the craft. Moreover, in his last three of four novels he has demonstrated an intellectual seriousness rare in fiction today. This is perhaps his best work to date - imaginative, serious, and yet also, in its humanity, an expression of love. The picture he offers of the world we are entering is frightening, but he has the courage to look its horror and arrogance in the face, and to say “nevertheless."

For Emma, by Ewan Morrison, Leamington Books, £19.99