Simon Stephenson - Set My Heart to Five

A story of loneliness, love and loose connections, Set My Heart to Five is a hilarious, touching, dazzlingly perceptive debut novel, and a profound exploration of what it truly means to be human.
Jared does not have friends. Because friends are a function of feelings. Therefore friends are just one more human obligation that Jared never has to worry about.
But Jared is worrying. Which is worrying. He’s also started watching old films. And inexplicably crying in them. And even his Feelings Wheel (given to him by Dr Glundenstein, who definitely is not a friend) cannot guide him through the emotional minefield he now finds himself in.
Soon his feelings will send him fleeing across the country, pursued by a man who wants to destroy him and driven by an illogical desire to share pathogens with the woman who bamboozles him the most.
And Jared cannot!
Because feelings will ruin your life, especially if you aren’t supposed to have them…

Comment: Definitely no idea anymore of why this book went in to the pile. The only reference I have is that I added it to my GR shelves in 2020... oh well, onto a surprise we go. Just as a curiosity, I've added it to my June list because my edition has an orange cover and that suited a topic in a challenge I'm doing..

This is the story of Jared, a robot who is a dentist, which is a job humans no longer want to do. In 2054, the world had a huge technological crash, then nuclear problems and now the humans who are left only do specific types of jobs. This wouldn't matter to Jared in normal conditions but the issue is that he has been developing feelings. By talking to a human doctor and checking out data, he recognizes this unlikely odd. Thus, he embarks on an adventure to write a script in which robots aren't the enemies and that they can been seen as heroes too, but will he succeed? After all, humans don't see robots that way... and what will happen when he is found to be missing from the job and the physical location he is meant to belong to? Is there hope for Jared's successful quest?

At first, this was quite a positive surprise. Having a robot as protagonist and narrator isn't that extraordinary in the world of fiction but it still offered a nice perspective on humans, actually. The whole book is one big commentary on what it means to be human and what kind of peculiar behaviors and notions humans have and why we are so great and so terrible at the same time. Through the eyes of Jared, we are both fun and weird.

The futurist setting also helps to justify some things Jared is able to accomplish and to say. He exists as a character and is done in a realistic human shape because technology evolved and humans now have different priorities in their work lives. However, many horrible situations happened - apparently nuclear wars erased New Zealand from the map - and robots are now a huge help, but of course they are also seen as the enemy. One could replace "robots" by another noun and we have the author's biggest goal: to criticize how we, people, judge and always believe we are better than someone else.

At least, this is my POV because throughout the novel, protagonist Jared goes on what I'd call a quest. He is also interested in movies, that is how his friend starts him off in his "feelings" path and clearly we, the reader, can find several similarities between Jared's path and Humanity's, which I think is done on purpose by the author. This means Jared tries many things that seem simple or basic to any person but which might sound weird to any being if rationality could analyze humans from a logical perspective.

Thus, Jared now has feelings and he wants to explore them at the same time he has a very specific plan. He wants to write his own script for a movie, to showcase the exact lesson he is learning and he follows the rules of film making that he learns from his friend. The plot is the demonstration of how to apply those rules to his own goal and what he wants is to write a script in which robots aren't the bad guys and just like with most movies where there is a hero, he wants a robot to be that, so that humans can see how unfair it is to think all robots are the same.

By the time Jared is on this journey, I was already thinking the plot was becoming a bit repetitive. I get it why he is doing these things and what kind of message I was supposed to receive but there are many things that happen too often, even in different situations. Since the author also wants to use the parallelism of the movie making rules and of Jared's quest as evidence art does imitate life, let's say, there comes a point where the story is only going to go one obvious direction. It's not that this is bad, but it can be a little too predictable.

Despite that, there were many funny passages, many that I consider were thought provoking and I was quite eager to see how Jared would react to learn how humans still deceive even when they are being nice. I think the author also wrote this in such a way that, if it were for this novel to be a movie, the choices are already done in how it could be. I think all this planning and set up just gets lots in some tiresome repetitions. Although the end was, in a way, as "cathartic" as Jared believed the end of a movie would need to be....

Grade: 6/10