tl;dr

A brilliant, complicated, radical novel about identity and self.  Alan Turing’s spirit pervades this book.

opening remarks

I first became aware of Will Eaves when his novel, The Absent Therapist, was nominated for the Goldsmith Prize in 2014.  I loved the book, a collection of fragmented voices that creates the impression of being in the middle of a crowd.  For whatever reason, I didn’t pick-up his 2016 book, The Inevitable Gift Shop.  I wasn’t going to make the same mistake with Murmur.

knee-jerk observations

Murmur is set during the two years when Alec Pryor (a very close analogue to Alan Turing) is undergoing hormonal treatment after being found guilty of gross indecency.  The opening section of the novel is a collection of Pryor’s thoughts, including this morose reference to his social life:

Part Two of the novel is set in the near future from the perspective of a machine intelligence that’s recalling how it came to be, or at least that’s my best guess at this point, I’ve only read a handful of pages.  Anyway, whoever the subject of part two, cognition and access to the human mind is a prime topic of discussion.

A scientist – we don’t know his name, but we do know he’s a biologist whose colleagues ‘model nerve plasticity and growth’ – has this profound thought about what makes us who we are.  I’ve certainly never thought about it this way:

Eaves doesn’t hide the connection between Pryor and Turning.  For instance, Turing’s schoolfriend Christopher Morcom, who contracted tuberculosis from drinking tainted milk, is, in Murmur, know as C. C. Molyneaux. The altering of names, blurring the lines between the fictional and the real, is a compelling move on Eaves’ part.

An older Alec Pryor, writing letters to June (I’m going to take a guess and say this is Joan Clarke) refers to being ‘beset by a man in the mirror’.  Is this Turing staring back at his alternate’s reflection?

Don’t worry about context here, just immerse yourself in an extraordinary piece of writing:

As the hormonal treatment takes effect, Pryor fears he will lose himself.

Alec Pryor’s rejection of the last 100 years of science fiction:

I have limitations as a reader and a critic.  Brought up on a diet of Doctor Who novelisations (yes, I blame Terrance Dicks) I’m not much chop when it comes to picking apart the language and structure of a story.  Late last year Emily Temple at lithub undertook a close read of the first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Live in the Castle. The way she unpeeled Jackson’s sentences, the manner in which she revelled in Jackson’s word choices, is something I could do, but nowhere near as well.  I say all this because Will Eaves has an appreciation of language, of its rhythm and shape that I can’t adequately express. All I know is that when I read the following paragraph with its “cut-price Rodin figurines” and its goblet hornbeams, I want to read it again.  And again.

The Gist Of It

Murmur is an expression of one man’s fear that he is losing himself, that his sense of self, his identity is slipping away.

The man in question is Alec Pryor, and just like his real-world analogue Alan Turning, Pryor is convicted for being gay, forced by the authorities to undergo hormone treatment, a form of chemical castration.  As his bodies changes, the question that occupies Alec’s mind is whether he will retain his memories and experiences, whether the person he recognises now as Alec Pryor will be the same person after the treatment is completed.  Eaves’ articulates this fear and doubt through Pryor’s dreams.  They replay back aspects of his past life at school where he met and fell in love with Christopher, or the day he proposed to June Wilson, and blend this with more surreal elements including a future where he has a wife and children, or where he seems to have been entrapped by the machine intelligence he finds so fascinating.

What anchors all these moments, strange and yet lucid, delivered in the most magnificent prose, are the correspondences between Alec and June. He details both his dreams and his fears while June counters with humour and the assurances that Alec is not alone.  These letters are the highlight of the novel because they are so deeply compassionate and human but never sentimental or twee.  I have no idea whether these letters are based on actual correspondence between Turing and Joan Clarke, but they are the heart and soul of this innovative, profound and beautiful novel.