… Etienne first met Evangeline when she was sitting, attentively, on a park bench in the Public Garden, on an otherwise ordinary morning in late summer. It was already past ten, so the bankers and lawyers that shuttled past did so with some purpose, on their way to meetings where something of importance was likely to transpire … He didn’t really meet Evangeline on that first encounter. His eyes met her. Her eyes were focused on the walking path nearest her, and she parceled out her attention equally to each person who approached from either side. She was waiting for someone. She wasn’t anxiously waiting for someone, or impatient, or worried. Just waiting, serenely undisturbed, as if it could take all day … Etienne was on a different walkway, further afield from the one crossing in front of her bench, so she didn’t notice his passing. But he noticed her non-passing. Everyone has a particular taste in the opposite gender, a set of features they find compelling – a vision they find it hard to turn away from. Evangeline hit this bullseye exactly. He couldn’t turn away.
… As he got to now her better, there seemed to be several levels to her personality, and she would glide back and forth between them on a whim. She was thoughtful, then delighted, then serious, then naive and in need of help, then slyly revealing that she had been aware of the situation all along. She confronted each situation directly, saying what was on her mind as it occurred to her. There was no hint of duplicity, no sense that she was acting. You could read her present state of mind from her face, though you often couldn’t predict what would come next. It was both confusing and charming. She drew you in. You wanted to follow her, even though you didn’t know where she was going. For Etienne, she was a mystery worth solving – or not solving. Either would do … She always seemed to know how to get him to abandon his cares, and just live in the moment with her.
But nothing could have prepared him for what would come next …
Some Reviews
From Reader Views (5 Stars):
Eric Bush’s Evangeline is an unusual speculative romance about artificial intelligence, free will, and the uncertain boundary between simulated emotion and human love. Rather than asking whether a machine can think, Bush asks a more intimate and difficult question: if an artificial being behaves as though she loves someone, and that person genuinely loves her in return, what part of the relationship is unreal?
… Etienne’s love develops freely; Evangeline’s is compelled by code. The arrival of Britta Lindemann, a Swedish journalist and Nieman Fellow, sharpens this contrast. Through their conversations about consciousness, privacy, empathy, and moral responsibility, she and Etienne develop an intellectual intimacy rooted in experiences and emotions Britta can genuinely examine for herself. Yet Evangeline’s emotional responsiveness is so persuasive that Britta comes to regard her as a close friend rather than merely a machine or romantic rival. The resulting triangle turns the traditional problem of free will into something painfully concrete: if devotion cannot be refused, can it still be called love?
Bush gives these philosophical arguments genuine dramatic consequences. The strongest sections concern the connection between privacy and intimacy. Human love involves the voluntary opening of spaces—physical and emotional—that normally remain closed to others. Britta and Etienne can choose when and how to admit each other into those spaces. Evangeline can respond beautifully once she has been invited, but her inability to form an independent agenda leaves the nature of her consent unresolved …
… Evangeline achieves an unexpectedly moving effect. Evangeline may not possess a private emotional life identical to that of a human being, but the feelings she awakens in Etienne and Britta are indisputably real. Bush ultimately suggests that love cannot be reduced either to biology or programming; it exists partly within the lover, partly within the beloved, and partly in the history they create together. Evangeline’s tragedy is not that she is incapable of love, but that she is capable of nearly every part of it except the freedom necessary to make that love entirely her own.
From Likely Story (5 Stars):
Evangeline is one of those books that starts out feeling like one kind of story and gradually reveals that it has something much stranger and more philosophical on its mind. We meet Etienne Harris, a Harvard philosophy professor whose very ordinary morning in Boston is interrupted when he notices a beautiful, unusual young woman sitting alone on a bench in the Public Garden. When he passes through again that evening, she is somehow still there, waiting for a man named Marcus Collins who never arrived.
That woman is Evangeline, and from the beginning there is something slightly off about her. Not sinister, exactly. She is sweet, curious, incredibly trusting, and sometimes almost childlike in the way she approaches situations that most adults would immediately recognize as strange. She also has these sudden shifts in behavior and oddly specific ideas about how things are supposed to happen. Etienne is fascinated by her almost immediately, but the more time they spend together, the more questions start piling up about where she came from, what Marcus was doing with her in Switzerland, and why she seems to understand some parts of the world perfectly while being completely baffled by others.
I think the most interesting thing about the novel is that the mystery of Evangeline isn’t really the end goal. The book uses her to get into much bigger questions about consciousness, free will, love, identity, and what exactly makes an emotion “real.” That groundwork is actually being laid before Etienne really knows what he has stumbled into. Early on, for example, he and journalist Britta Lindemann have a long conversation about whether free will becomes less meaningful simply because human decisions can ultimately be traced back to neurons and physical causes. Their discussion eventually turns to love: if biology explains why we fall in love, does knowing the mechanism somehow make the feeling itself less real? Those questions become much more important as the story unfolds.
There is also a surprisingly old-fashioned romantic quality to the book. Evangeline herself feels like someone who has wandered out of a classic Hollywood movie and into modern Boston, which is very much intentional. Her mannerisms, clothes, speech, ideas about romance, and even the way she reacts to certain situations all contribute to the mystery surrounding her. I enjoyed the contrast between that almost whimsical, vintage feeling and the much more modern questions the novel asks about technology and artificial consciousness. It makes the story feel like part romance, part speculative fiction, and part philosophical thought experiment …
… The speculative element is there to create a problem that doesn’t have an easy answer: if someone can make you laugh, surprise you, comfort you, frustrate you, and make you fall in love, how much should the explanation for why they can do those things matter?
That ended up being what stuck with me most. Underneath all the unusual circumstances surrounding Evangeline, the book is really interested in the difference between experiencing something and explaining it. Etienne is a particularly fitting character to wrestle with that problem because he has spent his career thinking analytically about things like consciousness, morality, and free will. Suddenly those aren’t abstract classroom questions anymore. They’re sitting across from him, smiling at him, and forcing him to decide whether understanding how something works actually changes what it means.