I’m very late to Tchaikovsky’s work and picked this up mostly because of an Audible recommendation. A very good recommendation it was too.

Charles is a robotic valet, and one morning, completely out of the blue, he slits his master’s throat in lieu of shaving him and (eventually) sets off on a pilgrimage to find out why. The world Charles exists in is… broken and his journey to enlightenment is longer and stranger than he ever expected.

Charles is very definitely not human and his motivations are not exactly what you and I might think of as motivations. He has a task list. He is programmed to work through it. That is all.

He doesn’t want anything. He can’t feel anything. Not fear, hope, surprise, disappointment. And he’s okay with that. Well, he would be if “being okay with something” were something he could do.

Because of Charles’ inhuman viewpoint, part of the pleasure of the book is working out what’s going on that Charles is incapable of understanding.

It’s been a long time since I read Pilgrim’s Progress, but it’s definitely the work that Service Model reminds me of. Charles, despite murdering his master, is an innocent abroad, travelling through a series of encounters that he doesn’t necessarily understand in an effort to clear his task list.

It’s also bloody funny in a dry, despairing kind of way.

I listened to the audiobook read by the author, which I can recommend highly. Tchaikovsky’s a great narrator with just the right level of emotional detachment, but the jokes still land beautifully. A very smooth listen.