Writing about real people is hard. Where do you draw the line between fact and fiction? Especially if you’re telling a story about people who haven’t long been dead, or if they’re even still alive, there are all sorts of difficulties about what you can and can’t make up. You have to strike a balance between staying true to the lived experiences of people who were once alive and making sure that the story is worth telling. And when writers do dare to take creative liberties with hard facts, there’s often a slew of critics ready to trash good books for playing fast and loose with history, or warping the past to fit an agenda (as though that isn’t what historians do, categorically). As if storytelling weren’t about making stuff up. All the same – you can’t tell outright lies.
One way around this issue, and so far one of my favourite ways to re-animate the dead, is to be open about the fact that trying to imagine what went on in a real person’s head is putting words in their mouth. This is the approach taken by Will Eaves in his latest novel, Murmur, a creative re-imagining of the last years of Alan Turing’s life. The first chapter of Murmur was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story award in 2018, and Murmur went on to win the Wellcome Book Prize this year. Strictly speaking I wouldn’t call Murmur historical fiction, less because it’s set in the fairly recent (1950s) past and more because it feels almost timeless, like the setting isn’t centre-stage. Yet we value the best historical fiction for breathing fresh life into the past, and Murmur is certainly a unique take on Turing’s life and work.
You’ll probably know that Alan Turing was forced to undergo chemical castration by the British State in the 1950s, as punishment for the “crime” of homosexuality. It is a disgusting story – not least because Turing, father of the modern computer, saved countless lives in the war in cracking the ENIGMA code – and there would be something uncomfortable about putting words into Turing’s mouth about his ordeal. Yet Murmur does something far cleverer: Murmur is about Alex Pryor, a fictionalised version of Alan Turing, undergoing the same ordeal and ruminating on the dreams and memories that are all he’s left with. Free to invent and imagine what Turing’s experience must’ve been like, Murmur is a brilliant meditation on alienation and empathy that doesn’t presume to write Turing’s story for him.
In Murmur, Pryor writes a journal and thinks through his dreams as his body undergoes the physical change of chemical castration. Once a week he is injected with hormones that render him infertile, destroy his sex drive, and cause him to grow breasts – all as a “cure” for his attraction to men. Yet Murmur is deeply poetic, with Pryor uninterested in going over the hard facts of his punishment:
It is strangely more instructive, for me, to imagine other conditions, other lives.
And so we explore the dreamscape of Pryor/Turing, and follow him as he imagines the different ways that life might’ve panned out: had he entered a marriage of convenience to a close friend and found himself an expectant father; how he might’ve explored his sexuality as a student in Cambridge; how things might’ve gone better between himself and his first love at boarding school. What emerges is a humane, intelligent novel, which brings to life Turing’s story and honours his still-groundbreaking work towards understanding what consciousness is and how we value our personhood.
It is touching, and a little heartbreaking, to dream with Pryor. Eaves sticks close to the basic facts of Alan Turing’s life – his childhood, his time at Cambridge and then Bletchley Park, his almost-marriage to Joan Clarke, here renamed June and whose letters to Pryor frame each dream-episode. Transformation haunts Murmur. Characters and settings who were solid one moment can dissolve in an instant:
He’s partly transparent, a flowing space … Around him stillness; in him fusion and echo, the voice radioed, whispering.
This shapelessness mirrors the physical changes that Pryor/Turing underwent in castration; Murmur has a fairy-tale tone, drawing on Turing’s real-life fascination with the story of Cinderella. Murmur is rich with classical reference, mingled with the mathematical and philosophical concepts that Turing worked with as an academic. The novel’s epigraph is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, another work that reminds us that often it is only through a change that we can recognise our essential being.
The imaginative time of a novel is one such place, and, in offering up a free space to consider Alan Turing’s life, Murmur also provides an opportunity to think about the nature of consciousness more broadly. The quest to design true artificial intelligence is really a question of understanding what thinking is. We barely understand our own brains, let alone know how to make one out of lines of code. Turing devised what’s now called the “Turing Test” – a question and answers game where, if a machine can fool a human into thinking they’re talking to another human, then that machine is considered “Turing-complete”, or a convincing artificial intelligence. The question of ‘can machines think?’ seems to me less interesting than the one that Pryor arrives at towards the end of Murmur, faced by the constructed thinkers in his dreams: if machines can think, will they be compassionate to us? We’re hardly compassionate to one another. Just look at the way Alan Turing was treated. No amount of £5 notes with his face on them is going to change that.
Will Eaves has clearly given this a lot of thought (ha); with Prof. Sophie Scott he runs The Neuromantics, a podcast about neurology, psychology and language. It’s a genius conceit, using the constructed-mind of a fictional character to ruminate on what minds are like, metal or fleshy.. There was something of David Mitchell at his best (Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green) in how easily Murmur examines some fairly large concepts about empathy, connection and consciousness. As artificial intelligence technology becomes more sophisticated and more commonplace we will need to evolve our understanding of consciousness and how minds are constructed with it. Even the Pentagon wants to hire an ethics professor to help it decide which people drones should drop bombs on. It will take sane, intelligent works like Murmur to remind us of the value of empathy and the tragedy of not attempting to understand those who think differently to us.
I don’t mean to make Murmur sound like a weighty tome, suitable only for philosophy discussion groups (though that’d be a fun afternoon). At only 176 pages, Murmur is a great distillation of these ideas in a readable, enjoyable format. It’s refreshing to see “historical” fiction that’s not afraid to be inventive with how we construct the past, and that isn’t afraid to take on big ideas in gorgeous writing.
‘Murmur’ is by Will Eaves and is published by Canongate. Buy it from Foyles here.
Credits:
- Murmur, Will Eaves (London: Canongate, 2018).
Images:
- Canongate Books and The British Library. Contact me for any copyright concerns.
Entertaining Mr Petre 