Speak starts with a prologue narrated by a doll that’s been “banned and marked for disposal” for being “excessively lifelike” (2). “I review stored information,” the doll says (3). It tells us it’s been “programmed to select which of [its] voices responds to the situation at hand: moving west in the desert, waiting for the loss of [its] primary function” (3). And so the stories that follow, the voices that follow, are people who have lost or are losing something, or multiple things: people, places, love, a sense of connection, a sense of purpose. There’s Stephen Chinn, who invented the babybots, those “excessively lifelike” dolls, and has been writing his memoirs from prison. There’s Gaby White, a teenager who, like others, was stricken with a spreading paralysis when her babybot was confiscated. There’s a married couple, Karl and Ruth Dettman, both Jewish refugees from Germany. There’s Alan Turing, writing letters to the mother of his childhood friend. And there’s Mary Bradford, a 13-year-old diarist in 1663, heading off to Massachusetts Bay Colony with her family.
I like the way the different sections/voices make use of a variety of narrative forms: there’s the straight prose of Stephen’s memoirs, but also letters and diary entries and, in Gaby’s sections, chat transcripts that are also exhibits of evidence from Stephen’s court case. And I like the way the different sections intertwine: the Dettmans were involved in the creation of the software that’s the predecessor to that used by the babybots, and Ruth Dettman worked on an edition of Mary Bradford’s diary. Images and themes recur: speech; silence; shells and spirals; Turing’s questions of where someone’s “mind-set” exists and how it can be preserved; Mary Bradford writing that her diary “shall serve as mind’s record, to last through generations” (37). And in addition to the theme of loss, there’s the theme of being trapped: in prison, in one’s body, in a marriage, at home, in one’s life.
I also mostly liked Hall’s writing style, which is often lush and lyrical, like in this passage from one of the Mary Bradford sections:
Next, rain. Rocks and meadows becoming silver, and trees waving like pennons. Dark green on one side, pale green on the next. Whole banks of trees, shifting from one hue to the other (70)
Or this, from one of Gaby’s sections, where she’s talking about taking a trip to see the ocean:
At first, it was so dark I could only see my reflection in the glass. I couldn’t see anything passing. But still, there was this feeling of movement. I’ve never felt anything like it. I think maybe human beings are meant to be moving. It was like I was vibrating at the right frequency. Slowly, dark shapes started to emerge outside the bus. They dripped past, like liquid. Liquid houses, liquid golf courses, liquid palm trees, liquid walls. A few lights on here and there. (300)
My one complaint is that the pace of the book felt like it lagged—it took me longer to finish this book than I expected it to, and partly that was because I was busy with other things, but I don’t think it was just that.
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