Speak by Louisa Hall review – the bots are taking over

A poet's ambitious alternative history of computing, from the Puritans to 2040

To speak of Speak is to remark on this novel's ambition and scope, woven from a varied series of first-person narratives: Mary, a 17th"century Puritan girl emigrating to America; Alan Turing pre and postwar; Karl Dettman, a 1960s scientist working on artificial intelligence (a character based on real-life computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum); Gaby, a young girl in 2035 suffering from a trauma-induced "lock-in" syndrome after her beloved robot doll was snatched from her; and Stephen R Chinn, who is in a Texas prison in 2040. Chinn is a Steve Jobs-style genius and entrepreneur who made billions designing and selling intelligent "babybots", who fell from grace when his invention proved too successful. Shy kids bonded with their bots to the exclusion of actual humans. Convinced their development was being impaired, the authorities confiscated them, and a psychological epidemic of stuttering, fitting and freezing swept through the child population. Chinn looks back on his life: from school nerd, via a stint as obnoxious pickup artist, to lonely billionaire prone to dating shallow supermodels who, in a narrative knight's move that is genuinely affecting, unexpectedly finds happiness with his physically unprepossessing cleaning lady - for a time, at any rate.

This sort of patchwork novel structure is very fashionable at the moment, as writers work to emulate the aesthetic and commercial success of books such as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men. But Hall is not just being modish. She draws all these disparate elements into a coherent whole made, in Chinn's words, of "widening spirals, delicate as the ripples that build into waves, the shoots that grow into branches on the most magnificent tree".