Freaks, monsters and robots

When you consider the ease and efficiency with which human beings are able to reproduce themselves by biological means, it seems strange that anyone should go to all the trouble and disappointment of attempting the process mechanically. But hubris, narcissism, curiosity and, above all, the desire for power are all stronger in human nature than the fear of failure, or even the fear of unleashing something uncontrollable. And so the history of humanity is shadowed by a parallel history - that of homunculi, automata, artificial animation, freaks, tricks, monsters, dolls and robots, whose story is the story of our fascination with ourselves.

In Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Gaby Wood picks up the thread of this history in the age of Enlightenment, the point at which, she argues, the ancient fascination with creating artificial life began to emerge from the shadows of necromancy into the clearer light of scientific and philosophical enquiry; when, in Umberto Eco's phrase, inventors "substituted mechanics for the forces of evil". That, at any rate, was the rational theory.

In practice, the process of producing a simulacrum of life by artificial means seems to have proved to be as fraught with original sin as the more basely physical method - or fraught, at any rate, with a similar clutch of irrational emotions: desire, obsession, envy, greed, remorse and revulsion.

Living Dolls is not so much a history of automata or, as the title has it, "the Quest for Mechanical Life" as a roughly chronological series of self-contained, non-fiction stories, or contes philosophiques, beginning in 18th century France with Descartes, who may or may not have constructed an artificial girl and called her Francine, which was his dead child's name, moving on to Jacques de Vaucanson, who built three marvellous automata - a piper, a flute-player with moving lips and fingers clad in skin, and a golden duck which could quack, take food from its exhibitor's hand with a lifelike gulping action and, most marvellous of all, excrete authentic green messes. The creature became not merely a celebrity, but a metaphor. "Without the shitting duck," Voltaire remarked, "there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France".

The duck was swiftly followed by an even more troubling phenomenon: a chess-playing automaton which appeared to be able to think. Somehow, the chimerical nature of these artefacts - the chess player didn't really think, any more than the duck really shat - failed to strip them of their fascination. By the late 19th century, the inventor Thomas Edison had begun to industrialise automata, with his attempt to mass-produce a talking doll - bizarrely anticipated, some years before the doll went into production, in a novel by the French writer, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, with the working title of Edison's Paradoxical Android. In the 20th century, Wood turns aside from mechanical artefacts into the related field of spectacle, with essays on the early French film-maker, Mèliës, and the Doll family of showbiz midgets, the last surviving member of whom, 86-year-old Tiny, she succeeded in interviewing.

This interview Wood evidently regards as something of a triumph. For the balance of her book, however, it is not good, for it shifts the emphasis from a speculative, charming, rather anecdotal account of historical oddities into something much more immediate and reliant on personal observation; second cousin, in fact, to a newspaper feature, with all the shallow palatability of that form. A thoughtful editor might have encouraged Wood to make a more persuasive link between the animate and inanimate themes of her book which is, even in its present form, with the last two essays rather lighter in weight than their predecessors, a haunting account of the wilder fringes of mechanical ingenuity and human self-absorption.