jungle house

the spectator 7 december 2023

Jungle House is not the sultry tropical tale you might expect either from its title or from its vivid, palm-strewn dust jacket. Instead, Julianne Pachico’s third novel concerns AI. This is not immediately obvious, and although there is an appealing directness to the writing, it means that no time is spent setting the scene or allowing readers to get their bearings fully. I could have done with more explication of the circumstances in which a young girl, Lena, comes to live in an AI-controlled house.

At the book’s opening, Lena has her work cut out:

“There’s fishing and mushroom-gathering and swimming in the river. Five days a week are for exercise and two days are for rest. In the orchard there are bananas and guavas, grapefruits and limes.”

Lena has moved out of the main house and is living in the guest hut, or ‘caretaker’s hut’, as she calls it. She refers to ‘Mother’, who these days is ‘angry all the time’, and one could easily assume at first that she is referring to her own mother. It is only cumulatively that it becomes obvious something far weirder is going on, though this early odd sentence should alert one: ‘Mother isn’t even the family’s only property.’ It turns out that Mother is the smart home. 

Pachico has been explicit in interviews about imbuing the AI aspects of her novel with flesh-and-blood traits:

“That was a decision I made very early on, that I’m not going to see these characters as machines or as mechanical. I’m just going to treat them like humans.”

Mother issues florid warnings to Lena about the ever-present danger of marauding rebels in the neighbourhood, insisting that she is not safe in the hut and must move back into the main house. Lena complies. But what are these warnings based on?

Pachico is not afraid to ask more questions than she answers, and there is something pleasing about this authorial boldness. Ultimately, she seems to be examining what it means to be embodied, as Lena reflects on what it might be like to be a machine without a corporeal self: ‘Imagine not having a back that aches when you sit improperly any more… No sweating, no staining, and definitely no smells.’

This review originally appeared in The Spectator