Speak

This school year has been really great in terms of the books we have been reading in class. For English, we recently read the Crucible which was a lot more interesting than expected. But now, we have just finished reading Speak by Louisa Hall and it is one of the strangest books I have ever read.

This story takes place throughout various time periods and is told by different characters. Starting from the oldest, Mary Bradford is a Puritan girl who is traveling to America in the 1600s. She wants to be an adventurer, but feels trapped by her marriage. She must face a terrible tragedy on her journey and decide to move on or remain in her grief. Alan Turing, who is the only real character in this book (but is still heavily fictionalized), is a mathematician and code breaker in the early 1900s whose story is shown through letters written to the mother of his best friends. However, throughout the course of  his life, he struggles more and more with grief and pressure from society, just like his real life counterpart. Then in the later 1900s, Karl Dettman is writing letters to his emotionally distant wife as their marriage is falling apart due to a Chatbot called Mary3 his wife won’t stop talking to. Sometime in the future, AI was created and turned into dolls called Babybots which is where Gaby comes in. Gaby lost her Babybot after they were deemed dangerous and doesn’t know how to continue life without it’s support, and her social isolation grows worse. And then the final voice is Stephen Chinn, the life story of the creator of the Babybots, and all the mistakes he made that lead him to being imprisoned for life. This book is a metaphor for the growing problem of smartphone addictions, but as I read it, it felt like so much more than just that.

One of my favorite things about this book is the imagery. It is so visually stunning, and it’s easy to tell that the author is a poet.

“Branches of lightning electrocute that oval of sky: not one spear but many, forked, intersecting, like the twisted branches of cedars. As though in that patch of sky the skin has been X-rayed, exposing a map of its luminous veins.”

This quote is so beautiful because the forked, intersecting lightning is just like the various voices of the story reflecting off each other and connecting. I also especially liked the wording of “luminous veins” because it made the sky seem more human and terrifying. It gives me the imagery of Ouranos from Greek Mythology for some reason, but I just really like this passage. Another place where the the descriptions were just spot on was in a letter by Ruth Dettman to her husband.

“Now I move among constellations, the same that Turing saw through Chris’s telescope, the same that sparkled above Mary’s ship. Now I’m not looking back any longer. From one star to the next I move away from the earth, alone in my spaceship, deeper into the darkness, until behind me the soup boils over and I draw myself back to make supper.”

This quote was the emotional realization of Ruth that she was ready to move on from her past and from her husband. Her description of space was so beautiful and terrifying, showing how moving on from the past can be completely uncharted territory. It is also so sad bringing in Turing and Chris considering that they both die and how that passion was pretty much lost forever. Another repeating motif in this book is the Fibonacci Sequence. This mathematical concept perfectly describes some abstract concepts, like the art of conversation. As Stephen Chinn describes it, a meaningful conversation has a starting point and grows into big ideas, just like the sequence. It is such an interesting way to think about speaking, but also interesting to think about how mechanical the basics of a conversation really is. Related to the Fibonacci Sequence, the spiral of the Golden Ratio is also everywhere in the book. From Turing’s long rants about the magic of the ratio to the robots actually seeing fossils in the shape of it, it shows how the motif is truly present everywhere. As a reader, these small details are so amazing to keep track of, because every time you read it, you find another piece of the puzzle that Louisa Hall has hidden.

My favorite character in this book was definitely Turing, because I already knew about him and what happened in his life. Reading this fictionalized version of him was really interesting because of that. His character is so relatable just because of how awkward he is when communicating with others, but he is such a passionate person who could spend hours talking about the subjects that interest him.

“I only add this in the memory of all my compulsive postscripts in our first letter exchange. They haunted me afterwards with wave after wave of humiliation! Walking to class I was sometimes forced to crouch down for a moment and put my hot face in my hands, for I was too ashamed of having jabbered on so much in my letters.”

I actually laughed out loud when reading that, and it really cemented the fact that Turing was the most interesting character in the novel for me. In addition to this, Turing basically creates a model for Artificial Intelligence, but the idea is taken out of his hands and is being worked on in other laboratories.

“The whole concept was like a child to me. Now he’s been taken up by more suitable parents and I’m left peering in windows to catch a glimpse where I can.”

I thought that this was such an interesting way to phrase his disappointment, and it really helps me as a reader understand Alan Turing’s character a bit better. However, his character arc is also the saddest in the entire book, at least for me. The entire point of this book is for characters to chase away their inhibitions and tell the story that matters to them. In the beginning, Turing was a powerful voice, always rambling on, passionate, and loud. However, as the book went on and especially after he was outed, his voice began to diminish. All the passion and energy he once had was gone, he forgot to add his signature postscripts, and it was so sad to see that happen. His final part in the book wasn’t even his words, it was the letter his housemaid sent after finding out he committed suicide. The world had effectively silenced his voice, and it was such a scary ending.

The opposite of Turing for me was the story of Stephen Chinn because though it was interesting, I hated Chinn as a character. He was isolated and bullied as a kid, but that was no excuse to grow up as a womanizer. He never thought about the feelings of others and only did what made him happy though it hurt the people around him. This especially happened with Dolores. The only reason he ‘fell in love’ with her was because she ignored him and was like a goal to be accomplished. Once he accomplished the goal and married her, it was almost like Chinn lost interest. And also, who actually says “she was so ugly my breath caught in my throat” about someone who works for them? This was the way Stephen literally thought of his to-be wife, and it shows how he really has never truly talked to a human being before. And then towards the end, he basically cheated on her with an online Chatbot. There was one quote I found especially funny though by Chinn.

“Listen, whiz mathletes: this is why English class is important. One day a terrible quiet will settle over your house. There will be no words. Then you’ll want to tell stories.”

It’s almost as if our English teacher made us read this entire book for just this line, so I guess it’s time to start paying attention in English! But the ‘terrible quiet’ that Stephen Chinn experienced does seem like a scary thought for the future. Chinn was an annoying character, but he was definitely a well written one.

Overall, this book is meant to be a metaphor for the growing problem of smartphone addiction. People and their phones are supposed to be inseparable, just like the children and their Babybots. Me personally, I don’t have social media and I’m glad I don’t because I don’t want to spend the majority of my day wasting time on one app. I’d prefer to waste it doing something else. I don’t think the seriousness of the problem is as bad as it feels in the book though, because if you take the phone away from a person, they probably won’t freeze up and completely fall apart socially. However, in the future as AI technology grows, there is more potential for people to get truly addicted and that is where I think the problem would actually start.

“Speak” was such a good read, and I can confidently say that I have never read anything like it. The way all the different stories connected and paralleled each other was just brilliant and unforgettable. The thing that really got me though was the ending. Each character didn’t really get a satisfying resolution, and it was up to the imagination of the reader. For an example, Mary had to make the final choice whether or not to accept Whittier, and her decision is never shown. However, it was mentioned previously that her grave next to Whittier’s was empty, so who knows what happened. Gaby’s story was also unresolved, because we don’t know whether or not her condition was cured after seeing the ocean. And then the Babybots at the very end were left to live until they ran out of charge, after which they effectively died. The ending of the book was really open-ended, and at first I was frustrated with the fact, but then I realized that it made the book much better because it didn’t just give us the answers. But overall, try out this book, because it was absolutely amazing!