THE blurb for A Robot in the Garden, the debut novel by Deborah Install, compares the book to the Paddington Bear books. If there ever was a warning to be heeded, that was it. Paddington is an original character existing in his own right quite apart from saccharine Disney stock characters and following, anything, the children’s fantasy tradition of Lewis Carroll and, if I daresay, is the literary precursor to Roald Dahl. The fantasy here does not exist in a separate world; instead the fascination is that Paddington and the Browns could very well be your neighbours.

However if suddenly Paddington’s adopted siblings, Judy and Jonathan, were to grow up and lead predictable adult lives with Judy as an OCD housewife and Jonathan as a jobless semi-depressed dropout, the pure innocence of the Paddington books becomes warped.

The childlike wonder of Paddington’s world now has to adapt to complex emotions and circumstances not meant for the world of Paddington bear. If the writer, nevertheless, does just that, what you have is an unoriginal, clichéd, depthless story which reeks of moral and ethical lessons. For example: you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it including a quick trip around the world on your inheritance to fix your robot friend; friendship is a good thing; love conquers all, and robots get drunk on diesel. That is, in a nutshell, A Robot in the Garden. If that made you cringe, do have a read — Goodreads has it in the same list as Princess Diaries and Hachi-Ko: the Samurai Dog.

The book’s main character is Ben, a 30-something veterinary school dropout living just outside of London rather comfortably off his inheritance, with his workaholic, discontent wife Amy. Ben is very much a quintessential Hugh Grant character — flawed, but you imagine so deeply guileless and profoundly lovable, that it’s okay if it takes him two weeks to take the rubbish out and longer to fix the gate. Theirs is a marriage of complete disillusionment with each other’s values and life paths. Then comes along a robot in their garden, which is sentient but curiously out of date and very broken. Ben names it Tang, and Amy wants to chuck it in the skip and instead get a house android. This is after all a world where artificial intelligence is literally a household need. There are laundrybots, house andro­ids, cybervalets, android brothels and other such commonplace con­­veniences.

Tang turns out to be an ancient version of artificial intelligence, and as Amy continuously points out is broken and hence useless for any function, household or otherwise. Ben, however, develops a bond with Tang and based on some quick clue hunting from Tang’s spluttered answers to Ben’s questions, decides to take him to California to be fixed.

This initial trip turns into an around-the-world hunt for Tang’s creator, from London to California to Tokyo and finally to Micronesia before heading back home. There are helpful strangers always around the corner to lend a hand, financial resources never seem to be a problem, and wonderful coincidences just keep happening until finally Ben, Amy and Tang find their happy endings.

The saving grace of this book is the robot Tang. He can be described as retro at best, and obsolete at worst. His descriptions are what keep the reader involved. Eventually the anthropomorphism creates a character so real and so touching that one feels that through Tang, Ben has come of age, both as an adult and as a parent. Tang’s transformation from a shy, jerky robot to a complete personality in his own right with opinions that he makes known in broken “Tang-lish” and with expressions that a robot can’t possibly have is what gives this book its endearing moments. Install makes it all sound completely plausible.

Whether it’s when Tang reaches the most logical and simple conclusions that an adult might never have imagined, or when he acts like petulant yet super-smart child, it is the robot that the reader follows affectionately. It is simply a shame that a spirited character like Tang was brought down by a plot that borders on clichéd writing that just lumbers on for about 300 pages.

A Robot in the Garden

(SCIENCE FICTION)

By Deborah Install

Doubleday, UK

ISBN 978-0857523020

288pp.