Sunday book pick: Husband, wife, and a sex robot in Rachel Ingalls’s 1987 novella, ‘In the Act’

“She saw herself as a lone, victimised woman beleaguered by selfish men. Her anger gave her a courage she wouldn’t otherwise have had.”

Helen’s husband Edgar is a class act. He coops himself up in the attic lab of their home claiming to be busy with his experiments. Their sons have left for boarding school and Helen spends much of her time at adult education classes. Her husband does not care what she gets up to as long as she leaves the house to him for a good part of the day. On the days when he feels like playing husband, he brings her roses – never mind that she prefers tulips, geraniums, chrysanthemums. Anything but roses.

Edgar is a smart and accomplished scientist, but a bore of a husband. On top of that, he’s neglectful too. An empty nest and mid-life crisis thrust the couple of Rachel Ingall’s novella In the Act, into a surreal world of robots and menacing scientific experiments.

Man and robot

The novella opens in media res with Helen telling her husband that her adult education classes – “flower arranging,” “oil painting”, transcendental meditation” – have been cancelled due to renovation work at the centre. He demands that she find something else to do and stay...

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