Murmur

by Will Eaves

Taking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and a rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we perceive ourselves and the world. Formally audacious, daring in its intellectual inquiry and unwaveringly humane, Will Eaves’s new novel is a rare achievement.

The opening section of Murmur was shortlisted for the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award. A recording of Blake Ritson reading this piece is available to listen to or download from the BBC radio iPlayer site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05gt0xw

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer, Mental Health, Literature

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2018

About the author

Will was born in Bath in 1967 and educated at Beechen Cliff School and King’s College, Cambridge.

After a brief spell as an actor and several years in trade journalism, he began writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1992 and joined the paper as its Arts Editor in 1995. He left in 2011 to become an Associate Professor in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick.

In 2020, he judged the Goldsmiths Prize and was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In 2016, he was a Sassoon Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Library.

He has written five novels, two books of poetry, and one volume of literary essays, and is represented by Carrie Plitt at Felicity Bryan Associates in Oxford.

He has given talks, seminars and readings around the world: at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Royal Society, the National Geographic Science Festival, the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Shakespeare and Co Bookshop, Medicine Unboxed, Belfast Book Festival, the Goldsmiths Prize Readings, Gay’s The Word Bookshop, Poetry East, the Mildura Writers’ Festival, Vout-O-Reenee‘s, and the University of Melbourne.

He has appeared several times on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, with Ian Macmillan, and on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week and Open Book. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He edits mss, grows trees, writes piano music, and lives in Brixton.

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now winner if the Wellcome Prize following being the joint winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Also shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmith prize and on the longlist for the 2019 Folio Prize and shortlisted for the 2019 James Tait Black prize.

These are, or were, the contributing circumstances. I view them unsentimentally. It is interesting that I do not consider their rehearsal to be a serious kind of thought. Underneath them runs echoes and rills of different order, however, the inner murmur, and these I take to be true thinking, determinate but concealed.”

I had the tremendous privilege, at the Republic of Consciousness Prize event of being introduced to Charles Boyle (the publisher of this and many other outstanding books and also a brilliant author in his own right - most recently under the pseudonym Jack Robinson) and he asked if I had read this book yet. When I said I hadn't - he commented that it was not a book to be rushed.

Unfortunately my natural reading style is quick - so I would instead say that this is a book which needs to be re-read, and the Goldsmith shortlisting provided the perfect opportunity for a re-read.

On my second read I appreciated the book even more than the first time, although it remains a complex and demanding book – however it is one that is packed with clever detail and allusion, and I suspect will reveal more of its subtlety on each read.

The book opens with a chapter which was shortlisted for a BBC short story award and is the journal of Alec Pryor, a mathematician and ex Betchley Park cryptographer. Alec has been convicted for gross indecency after meeting a young man, Cyril, at a fairground and rather than jail, accepts a year of chemical hormone injections and psychological counselling.

Alec’s story is based on that of Alan Turing – but with many of the names and some of the details changed (as set out in Paul’s excellent review).

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Eaves has called Pryor a "Turing Avatar" - but has been at pains to point out that he is not Turing, as Eaves is aware of the depth and subtlety of Turing's words and thoughts and would not be so presumptuous as to believe he could directly write them.

Turing’s therapy sessions were with a Jungian therapist - Jungian therapy (https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/th...) being “designed to bring together the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind to help a person feel balanced and whole. Jungian therapy calls for clients to delve into the deeper and often darker elements of their mind and look at the “real” self rather than the self they present to the outside world”, often relying on dream journaling.

Turing himself was of course famous for his exploration of the idea of consciousness and thinking – particularly in exploring the idea of what it means for machines/computers to think as well as being a practical expert in the area of decoding and analysis of secrets through his work at Bletchley Park.

And this book is really an exploration of these ideas - as well as a profound examination of how someone can remain reasonable and decent in the face of pain and confusion, particularly when those conditions are bought on by inhumane treatment. Further Eaves has said that he was interested in how someone like Pryor/Turing - used to operating in a dispassionate, neutral third-party observer world of material science, would cope when faced with understanding a situation where his own experience and pain was fundamentally linked to the situation he was trying to understand.

The opening chapter is, by the standards, of the rest of the book relatively straightforward (albeit still erudite and idea-packed compared to most literary novels), but starts to pick up on some of the ideas above and the themes that will drive the rest of the book.

“It is strangely more instructive, for me, to imagine other conditions, other lives”

“Things seem to be sadly lost, put to bed, left on top of golden summits in the past, trailing away until we see what the lines of event and memory have traced: a plane. A loop that encloses all loss, has no beginning and end”

“It is akin to asking … at what point unconscious material become conscious. Where does one cross over into the other? If the tesselation of forms is perfect, do they divide? Or are they one?”

“I don’t have any kind of social life. It’s topologically invariant under many deformations you might say, although probably only someone without a social life would say that.”

“I have the conviction I am now something like x – a variable. We discuss dreams and in the course of these discussions I have come to see dream figures as other sets of variables”

The second part of the book – Letters and Dreams is where the book gets much more complex

The series features what appear to be a series of Pryor’s dreams, each book ended by letters between Pryor and June (a fellow cryptographer who he nearly married in the War years) which examine the possible meaning and significance of the dreams and Pryor’s state of mind at this treatment and fate.

It could be said of course that these letters are Pryor and June's attempts to decode the meaning of the dreams (alluding to their work as code breakers).

The dreams range from:

the ancient past - at times heading back to the ice age;

the recent past – including elements of Alec’s schoolboy years and his friendship with another boy Christopher, his past relationship with June;

the present - Turing's treatment, his interactions with his therapist

into the future (for example at times he is married and is a father, at other times he seems to be in the 21st century viewing how artificial intelligence is influencing our world) with characters appearing in different guises (his psychotherapist as a schoolmaster or his family and June as characters from Snow White);

the ancient past – at times heading back to the Ice Ages

They are written in what Eaves describes as blank verse and as having a delineated, interstitial quality full of emotion, passion and feelings.

This part can be very difficult to follow at times - although I found much more to appreciate the second time and think that more would be revealed on each subsequent reading.

I was reminded in my approach of the patient and persistent approach that the Bletchley cryptographers had to use to break the German codes - looking for small sections where they could hazard an understanding (common phrases, deliberately planted co-ordinates) and using those to crack the wider text.

As an example I realised this time that the detailed, and rather haunting Snow White scene with Alec’s mother is likely a reference to Turing’s apparent suicide method (using a cyanide laced apple)

A reference to Jane Austen’s Anne (from Persuasion) likely reflects Alec’s dignity and maturity - which I think is key to the book and to Eaves appreciation of him.

At one point a Quantum field influenced discussion of dreams leads June to say “I have heard that dreams are p- and t-reversed: they mean the opposite of what they show, and are all effect in anticipation of cause.” – which I also took both as a reference to the time dimensions of the dream above and a clever reference to the co-mingling of the stories of the fictional P(ryor) and real life T(uring).

I enjoyed the many references to Ovid’s Metamorphosis – reflecting I think Pryor/Turing’s own work in morphogenesis, the sexual metamorphosis that Pryor fears he is undergoing, and the Metamorphosis of man and machine his work is exploring.

At one point Alec says “The world is not atomistic or random but made of forms that interlock or are interlocking like the elderly couple in Ovid who become trees” – which give as nice link to the Booker longlist and “The Overstory” with, of course, that couple explicitly being the inspiration for the characters of Ray and Dorothy.

There are also references to among others: Tesselation, Topology, Escher, Isotopes (Silver as a symbol of equality given its isotopic construction), Schrodinger, Godel, Copernicus, Poincaré, Baudelaire: with the blend of mathematics/sciences and the arts reflecting Turing’s own bridging of those two divides.

The book finishes with a journal section – where Alec is confronted by a council of machines that his work has created (or which possibly created or postulated him and/or his dreams once they gained consciousness).

Overall an ambitious and challenging book but challenging in all the right ways – a profoundly moving one that also stretched my intelligence or (to quote the book)

None of this fantasy, none of the objects in this inner room are memories or perceptions. They’re nether past not present, yet they form a kind of boundary. They’re states of mind and real appearances and I think of them …. as a book of mathematical puzzles

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joint Winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019
Shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize

I already had a copy of this book before the Goldsmiths shortlist was announced last week, so it was an obvious choice to move up the to-read list. Since its subject is a lightly fictionalised version of Alan Turing (Alec Prior in the book), it promised to be very interesting. It is boldly experimental, but sadly for me it proved very difficult to follow, so I don't rate its chances of finding a readership outside the world of experimental fiction.

Part of the confusion arises because the book attempts to map Turing's confused state of mind after his controversial hormone "treatment", so it is a mixture of thoughts about the nature of consciousness and intelligence and the dreams that haunt him - these are mostly about his schooldays and his friendship with Christopher Molyneaux , a schoolboy prodigy who died very young (Christopher Morcom in real life). There is also in a series of letters to and from the woman he almost married (June Wilson in the book, Joan Clark in real life) - towards the end he admits that this correspondence is also imaginary.

There is little overtly scientific content - the reason I struggled to follow the book was its deliberately confused organisational logic, which perhaps matches Turing's own state of mind.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the Wellcome Prize, Joint winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize, longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize, as I had hoped when I read it in back in February 2018

The RoC judges' citation:

Along with Galley Beggar Press, Charles Boyle’s CB Editions is now the only press to have appeared on all three Republic of Consciousness longlists. Murmur is a marvel. Will Eaves has conceived an avatar for Alan Turing and then conjured up his dream world to muse on what versions of ourselves we are building in the twenty-first century – musical, stimulating and moving.

Though it is doubtless an impolitic thing for a materialist to admit, I cannot help wondering if the real nature of mind is that it is unencompassable by mind, and whether that Godelian element of wonder – at something we know we have, but cannot enclose – may not be the chief criterion of consciousness.

Charles Boyle of CB Editions has made an hugely important contribution to the UK literary scene, both as an author (notably under the pseudonym Jack Robinson - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...) but also as a one-man-band independent publisher of some wonderful literature, focusing on short fiction, poetry, translations and other work which, as the Guardian noted, ‘might otherwise fall through the cracks between the big publishers’. Past works include the simply stunning Ágota Kristóf.

In January 2017 (http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2017...) he announced he was going into semi-retirement. A year later in January 2018, fortunately it became clear semi- genuinely didn't mean permanently. As he explained on the same blog:

I like being able to bring new books into the world (it’s an extraordinary privilege) but not everything involved in the process: I don’t enjoy, for example, anything associated with the word marketing or applying for funding. CBe continues but at a low level, with a different rhythm: plotted as an electrocardiogram, it will look like I’m falling asleep for long periods, but with sudden peaks of excitement – the latter representing books that I simply cannot not publish.

For example: there will be, in March, Murmur, Will Eaves’s new novel. Or if not exactly ‘novel’, a book that at least will cause booksellers less headache than Will’s last book when they think about where to shelve it.

Will Eaves' last book was, of course, the Goldsmith's shortlisted The Absent Therapist - my review of which concluded "There are shades of the micro-fiction of Lydia Davis and the polyphonic voices of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - but Eaves carves out his own distinctive approach" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

The opening chapter of Murmur, submitted as a stand-alone piece, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0952zlk). An extract from the resulting novel - essentially the short story - is available here: http://www.cbeditions.com/userfiles/f...

It starts with Alex Pryor, a mathematician and cryptographer, having been convicted for 'gross indency' . As he tells us:

Do I need to set down the circumstances? The results are in the papers, and once again* I am disinclined to ‘show my working’. It is strangely more instructive, for me, to imagine other conditions, other lives. But here they are, so that my friends, when they come to these few thoughts, may do likewise.

I had just finished a paper and decided to award myself a pick-up. I met the boy, Cyril, on the fairground. He seemed undernourished and shifty but not unengaging; living, he said, in a hostel, working casually. I bought him pie and chips on the grounds and invited him home for the weekend. He didn’t turn up, so I went back to Brooker’s, waited for the fair to close that night, and took him home soon after. He was not unintelligent, I found – he’d liked the boys’ camp in the war, did some arithmetic there, and knew about Mathematical Recreations. Cyril was, I’d say, the product of natural sensitivity, working-class starvation and nervous debility.

(* as an aside, in the original short-story version for once in my life he was disinclined to 'show my working' rather than the intriguingly revised once again)

He has elected for chemical castration rather than imprisonment, subject to one-year regime of injections of stilboestrol, a synthetic oestrogen, as well as psychological counselling. And he reflects:

I wonder about the coming together of events and people that have produced my crisis. If I were to find a mathematical or topological analogy, I suppose that it would be ‘tessellation’ – where the contours of one form fit perfectly the contours of another. If I had not finished the paper on morphogenesis when I did, I should not have ventured out in search of a reward. If had not had the upbringing I did have, I should not have thought of sexual relations as a candidate for ‘reward’. The very interesting Mr Escher, whose prints have finally awoken my fellow mathematicians to the possibility of an aesthetics of undecidability, has called this coming together the ‘regular division of the plane’, but it is a little more than that, because it is a division that entails change. The world is not atomistic or random but made of forms that interlock and are always interlocking, like the elderly couple in Ovid who become trees.

Time is the plane that reveals this interlocking, though time is not discrete. You cannot pin it down. Very often you cannot see the point at which things start to come together, the point at which cause generates effect, and this is a variant of the measurement problem. It must also be akin to asking at what point we begin to lose consciousness when we are given an anaesthetic, or at what point unconscious material becomes conscious. Where does one cross over into the other? If the tessellation of forms is perfect, do they divide? Or are they one?

The rest of the book is essentially his journal of the time, but the treatment causes a certain fragmentation of his personality. In part his story is told by his own reflection in a mirror, in part by a voice - the murmur of the title:

These are notes to pass the time, because I am in a certain amount of discomfort. I suppose it is fear, and keeping a partial journal distracts me. But I am also drawn to the pulse of that fear, a beat, an elevated heart rate – and something more than that, which comes through the thinking and is a sort of rhythmic description of my state of mind, like someone speaking quickly and urgently on the other side of a door.

I know that Pythagoras is said to have delivered his lectures from behind a screen. The separation of a voice from its origin gave him a wonder-inducing authority, apparently. Perhaps he was shy. Or ugly. Anyway, I’ve never had this experience before. This morning I could hear the inner murmuring accompanying trivial actions: ‘I’m up early, it’s dark outside, the path I laid haphazardly with my own hands is now a frosted curve. I put some crumbs down for the blackbird singing on my neighbour’s chimney pot. Beyond my garden gate a road, beyond that fields speeding away towards the tree-lined hills and crocus light. I wait beside a bare rowan, its berries taken by the blackbird and her brood, the wood pigeons and jays.’ And then again, moments later, when I caught myself looking back at the garden through the doorway: ‘He passes through the silent streets, across wet roofs and closed faces, deserted parks. He moves among the trees and waiting fairground furniture.’

The error is supposed to be ‘looking back’, isn’t it? Poor Orpheus, etc.

Of course, it has occurred to me that the balance of my mind is disturbed, just as it has occurred to me that I am reckoning with a deliberate retreat from the world, a passing out of sight into, well, invisibility. What lesson might that passage have for me? It is an extension of my preference for anonymity, I suppose. It is commonly said, or felt if it is not said, that people respect others of importance who have achieved things or held office; but it is a curious fact that self-respect is often found to exist in inverse proportion to public status. It has learned to pass nights alone. It does not seek approval because it knows that estimation has nothing to do with achievement.

Of course Alex Pryor's story is essentially that of Alan Turing, Cyril he met at the fairground a stand-in for Arnold Murray, who Turing met outside a cinema.

This use of characters with changed names, but strong similarities, is perhaps in part to avoid the controversies of the movie The Imitation Game and to permit Eaves to add his own fiction. But it does cause the reader a certain distraction as it is hard not to try and figure which characters are real and named as such (e.g. the astronomer Arthur Eddington), which are ciphers (e.g. Alex's school friend Christopher Morcom standing in for Turing's Christopher Molyneaux and Dr Anthony Stallbrook representing the Jungian psychologist Dr Franz Greenbaum, except he also stands in for Pryor's schoolmaster) and which appear to be fictional. Others left me a little confused - e.g. Julius Trentham, a collaborator of Pryor's appeared to correspond to more than one person.

But, of course, that very confusion may be quite deliberate from Eaves’s perspective as it plays into the questions about the nature of identity and the fracturing of personality which were important to Turing's philosophical thinking, and to this novel. At one point Pryor comments:

The problem with disguising or encrypting is that the original still exists. One has doubled the information, not made it less sensitive. Something has happened to it, but the semantic loaf persists behind a mask, a veil, a foreign accent, new papers, breasts etc., and really the only thing to do about that, if you’re still anxious, is to remove both bits of information - the original and the encryption- altogether.

the reference to breasts a nod to the gynaecomastia that was a side condition of his treatment, and the last sentence perhaps a nod to the ultimate fate of Turing (although not necessarily Pryor as the book doesn't reach that point).

The bulk of the novel, after the introductory story, consists of a section entitled Letters and Dreams.

Each of the 6 sections begins with a quote from Turing, not just of his famous work but also his more philosophical and even theological thinking. There then follows a combination of an exchange of letters with June, who as with Turing's own friend Joan Clarke, was a colleague of Pryor's in his Bletchley Park day, a soul mate and someone to whom he first proposed marriage before breaking off the engagement and 'confessing' his sexuality, and of dreams sequences which he recounts and they discuss in the letters.

These dreams include flashbacks to his prior life, but with the usual distortions of dreams - e.g. his psychologist reappears as his form teacher at Walgrave School (a cipher for Sherbourne). But some are from before his birth - hunting woolly mammoths 30,000 years ago (when we first killed living things and ate them) and even more oddly some after Pryor’s own life, forward thinking hallucinations such as a funfair on Clapham Common in the early 2000s.

These dream sequences were perhaps the part of the novel I struggled with as this is a difficult trick to pull off in fiction. But this concept of transformation is key to Eaves's theme:

It strikes me that a mirror reflects, but that, geometrically speaking it transforms rather than translates. One is turned back on oneself and in the process one sees a second person, a new person who one does not fully recognise. Always uncanny, this about-facing, and not unrelated to the common fair of automation, which people assume to be a sort of coming doom. The fear of robots, I take it, is like the fear of prophecy, the essence of which is repetition: of you can be repeated, you can be replaced.

The novel ends with another journal entry which makes it clear - or rather even less clear - that even some of the dreams may not have happened, but he dreamt he dreamt.

Overall, my one reservation was the heavy dependence on dream narration. But a beautifully written novel - sensitive, erudite but poetic - and one I hope achieves the attention it deserves. I strongly hope to see Will Eaves figure once more in the Goldsmiths prize, and surely a 2018 Republic of Consciousness contender as well.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Eaves has certainly taken a lot of risks with this short condensed novel. In my view, it has paid off.

It is a complex book to think about, even more so - to write about in a linear fashion. It has got a very complex structure. It could be viewed as a matrix: in terms of the content, it is a tribute to the life and work of Alan Turing; at the same time it is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of consciousness. In terms of the form, it is a whole bunch of stuff, but mainly it is a blank-verse poetry presented as dreams or hallucinations. Those dreams are intermingled with short essay pieces presented as letters. To top it up, the first part is more or less stand alone, more or less straight-forward short story on the same subject matter.

Sometimes, I thought whether this complexity added or took away from my appreciation of the book. I was seriously helped by the fact that i came to this novel after reading The Inevitable Gift Shop, Eaves’s earlier and more autobiographical collection containing his proper poems. I was also familiar with the subject matter (both Turing’s life and the areas Eaves examines). So I wonder how would I interpret the novel, if it would not be the case. I love poetry, so I guess I would still enjoy the book, but certainly it would make less memorable and more confusing experience. However, as it stands, the book has made me to revisit certain ideas which is always rewarding. And it is a moving tribute to the man who helped his country to win the huge war only for the country to pay him back with the cruelty and injustice.

I start again.

Knausgaard said: “Dreams in literature are monstrosities: whenever I come across one, it takes a lot for me not to flip past it or shut the book altogether. It tells me that the writer has failed to understand his responsibility to reality, or else has not understood the role of the imagination in real life”.

In majority of cases, I would totally agree with him. I find it very irritating if a book contains lots of dreams by the characters. I am already reading something which is presumably the work of someone’s else imagination so i do not need the literary device which would just double it. But there is one exception.

Freud said: “Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.” And Eaves is primarily a poet for me. In "Gift shop", I considered his poems as the best part of the book. They are multidimensional, vivid, imaginative. Here, as well, if one considered the dream sequences as a long-form poetry and stops trying to search for the logic in them, just flowing with the imaginary, I would bet, it would be more enjoyable than trying to figure out what reality it corresponds to. My only complain that Eaves has chosen to write it in paragraphs. I could feel the rhythm, the music there; the vividness, the dreaminess. It would be bolder to have it in stanzas. But they are beautiful in any case.

They are loosely based on certain facts of Turing’s biography. But I would not be preoccupied with that. I do not think one needs to know who is who there. It is more archetypical with Metamorphoses by Ovid and Snow White fairy tale are closely involved. Turing loved the movie “Snow White and 7 Dwarves” released in 1937. He was fascinated with the story. Tragically, he died biting an apple filled with cyanid. It was judged as a suicide then. And in Eaves’s dreams sequences we meet the characters from Snow White, bearing untidy symbolism, transforming into other characters and back. We also meet with the mirrors and the apple.

More symbols and more transformations - water, lake, hunting the stag, adolescent love story etc. Eaves character said himself: “They (dreams) are full of magical symbolism”. So for me there were not as much as dreams as poems.

Now, I am not very good with the inserting the spoil alerts, so I just warn that below is my interpretation of the second layer of meanings of this book based upon relatively closed reading. And if you have not read it, you might want to solve the riddle in your own way.

Consciousness:

The blurb say “It is a profound meditation on what machine consciousness might mean and implications of AI”. I think, it is much wider that that. In fact, pure machine consciousness is touched upon, but it is not main purpose. I would dare say, the book is an inquiry into human consciousness, the consciousness as a phenomenon. Eaves is grappling with different ideas of consciousness, his own and others thinkers. The result is a slightly disorienting, challenging in parts, but certainly thought-provoking.

In very broad terms, consciousness is our subjective experience and sense of self-awareness. Sometimes it is equated with mind. It is stuff which is unique to us: how do we experience pain, taste, colours, anything which no-one would be able to know on our behalf; it is related to our self.

“Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.” Stuart Sutherland has gently summarised some of the difficulties in his entry for the 1989 version of the Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology: (as per Wikipedia). I hope you would disagree with Mr Sutherland, at least with the last sentence. Eaves would have done so, it seems.

I have not mentioned before that he does not make Alan Turing his character. He creates Alec Pryor, the fictional being, which shares quite a few biographical details with Turing, including being forcibly treated with hormones (chemical castration) as a punishment for being gay. Nevertheless, Alec is a separate character. Initially I was fascinated why did Eaves needed Alec. At the end there are many fictional novels with non-fictional characters. The work of Javier Cercas or Bruce Duffy comes to mind. But later in the novel, I understood. I think, Eaves needs Alec as a mouthpiece for his investigation into the complicated phenomena of consciousness, self and free will. I do not know to which extent, these broad subject fascinated Turing. Even if they would, it does not seem to be sufficient evidence to know what he thought about it (maybe excluding machine intelligence). Eaves puts some Turing’s thoughts as epigraphs to each of his 6 parts. But it seems, to me he is more interested in sharing the results of his own inquiry than pretending to be inside the mind of the genius and get it wrong. I think it a wise choice.

The book discusses different aspects of consciousness and ideas about it:

- Under the influence of the hormones Alec’s body is changing. He is thinking whether it affects his “I”. He is afraid to lose his memories, he suffers great deal, but
he thinks “I” would not totally disappear. He says: “It’s Russell’s “neutral stuff” of the mental and the physical worlds, isn’t it, but oh it is not neutral matter being caught between them!” Eaves refers to so called neutral monism, the view supported by Bertrand Russell, which states that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them.

- Field awareness is mentioned a few times. I think, it refers to quantum physics when the presence of an observer affects the result of the experiment. Some scientist think that the conscious can affect matter. Interestingly, Princeton University is running Global Consciousness project which is supposed to measure the effect of global conscience on the matter with allegedly positive results.

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

- Qualia - a trendy way to refer to our subjective feeling for pain, or colour, or taste. Alec/Eaves brings it about generalising on his situation: “Pain is the memory without witness and collaboration. It is not real for anyone else. That is allows for torturers, including government, being torturers.”

- Schrödinger “theory of consciousness”. In the one of the letters Alec says to June, his friend and ex-fiancee: “I would go so far as to say that we are commonly alone. This is a version of Schrödinger’s theory of consciousness. We each have our view of the same mountain.” Schrödinger’s views on the subject totally permeate this book. They resurface in different places and in different disguises. In fact, I do not think Schrödinger has had a theory per se. At least he, himself was saying that the future generations would come up with the one uniting the Western empirical science and what he called “the Eastern doctrine of identity” which formed his belief.

Schrödinger thought that there is a single consciousness, which is non-dual. In other words, that mind is not separated from the things experienced within the mind. His metaphor for this was a painter who inserted himself into his bigger painting of the world. His view we was close to the philosophy/religion of Advaita Vedanta (a certain variety of Hinduism).

“I submit that both paradoxes will be solved (I do not pretend to solve them here and now) by assimilating into our Western build of science the Eastern doctrine of identity. Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I should say: the overall number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations. But I grant that our language is not adequate to express this, and I also grant, should anyone wish to state it, that I am now talking religion, not science.” (Schrödinger, What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches, p. 134–135.)

So implications of this view that there is only one mind and always was. With our language we would struggle to express this as even in the simple syntactic way we have tenses. The differences between us is that different view of the same mountain, which Alec/Eaves quotes (Schrödinger used different Everest’s picks). It is not that each of us is the part of the common mind. No. We are the same mind in its totality. “But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it... For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours... is, in a certain sense, the whole... “ ( Schrödinger from What is life? again).

To illustrate the point that the mind is single, Schrödinger points out that we never think of ourselves in plural, even in the dreams or in the cases of the split personality. It is always one “I”.

These ideas would explain Eaves’s using the same first person for different creatures, modern humans, archaic humans etc. They all seem to be the faces of this single consciousness. Or at least, that is how I’ve read it. He also uses “singulare tantrum” after Schrödinger. It means in Latin something which could be only in a singular. And the one of those “I”s created by Eaves says: “I am returned to the connected mind the unconfined and abstract space from which my own particles shrink” - sounds very much like Schrödinger’s consciousness.

AI consciousness - here it is more straightforward. Turing was thinking about it himself as well. He is the author of the famous Turing test. But Eaves expends his ideas with the beautiful passage:

“In the calculation, in the latter stages when I can see things falling into space. The figures and the symbols are so right that they seem to take on some of the self-conscious wonder of the person manipulating them. They move towards awareness. They, and not I, seem to say: oh, but now I see. And when that happens it is like seeing a mind arise from matter to discover that it cannot go back to its former childlike state. The matter is transformed. It is responsible now.”

Alec/Eaves also contemplate about a shared mind in the sense of the connectivity, something similar to what we have now, but much more extreme - how would it look like to be constantly connected? “Where would the need for people go, the unspoken, the private stranger whom we love for being like us alone?” He argues that people would “entertain each other thoughts” instead of entertaining themselves. But this connected mind would not probably be a conscious entity anyway as “a shared mind has no self knowledge.”

The main metaphor of the book created by Eaves himself is a room. It is a complex one as it stands for the consciousness - one cannot come out as one cannot perceive the world from outside oneself. At one point of the novel the one of the “I”s even transforms into a room. It is metaphor for life as well:

“It is a singulare tantalum, love, the room of life, but everybody furniture is different, and none of us remembers where it came from, though we deeply sense it’s held in trust… But it will be consciousness and what it means is - there will always be the room. You will always wonder what outside the room, and who made it, and whether you are made by others or self-made original or successive, one in a long series of things patterned or randomised, and you will feel alone.”

Note, Schrödinger’s “singulare tantalum” resurfaces again. I think this metaphor could be also applied to a super intelligent AI. As likely, it would be locked away in a separate physical room and kept off line for security reasons.


Self

One cannot think about consciousness without breaking it down to the problem of identity, the problem of the self. Eaves finds a very fascinating way of looking at it. As i mentioned before Alec’s self has got a whole multiplicity of faces. I would like to look at what Eaves has created at a slightly different angle. And he gives me a lot of hints that i could do it. Quantum physics and its “many worlds” interpretation. Eaves peppers the text with the words like “spin”, “entanglement”, “the weak interpretation”. This is all the vocabulary of the quantum physics. He makes also some direct references about the role of an observer in quantum experiments.

The one of the interpretation of the quantum phenomena is the existence of many words where the all possible alternative scenarios of an action take place. These worlds are even interacting with each other at some level. These worlds are constantly being created when a particle’s trajectory is defined. This hypotheses was initially suggested by Hugo Everrett and currently is still supported by some influential physicists. (I apologise to all the scientists - I am dreadfully simplifying). From this, one might conclude that in an other quantum world Alec’s life was different. In fact, there could be more than one of those worlds. Alec says: “A glimpse of states, I had, the states to be, an infinite progress of the frames.” In other part of the novel, Alec/Eaves says: “The world is full of discrete notes, probabilistic states, and gaps. Only a wave can take us from one to other; a force or flow; or perhaps a field” (this is might be referred the weak interpretation of quantum phenomena by Bohm. The world “weak interpretation” is mentioned as well in the novel). So if we look at the novel through this lens, we could see Alec’s life in different worlds going differently:

- in one world he is a scientist in the 21st century, married, his wife is expecting a baby, but he is suddenly having a stroke and ends up incapacitated in a wheel chair, unable to communicate;

- in another Alec bites the apple and dies (p 59)

- one more world - and Alec has got two children, twins; he is talking to his daughter about her place in the world. That the bit I found incredible moving.

- and another world - Alec finishes his treatment and just continues his life.

Sometimes, in each of these worlds Alec hears or experiences the presence of the other worlds’s Alecs.

This total construction should not work, it too complicated, it should fall into pieces or should feel like a cheap trick. But somehow Eaves pulls it out and it works.

And of course, there is a mirror - so many meanings! Sometimes there is a man in the mirror to complement the picture. Zizek says “The surface (of the mirror) functions as a kind of “black hole” in reality as a limit whose “Beyond” is not accessible. Again, mirror test is used to judge whether a creature has got a conscious self or not. Babies from the age of 18 months, some apes and pigeons can identify themselves, but not dogs, for example.

Free Will

The problem of free will is related to the problem of consciousness. If every effect has got the cause, then everything is predetermined. Even the name Pryor might be allusion to prior - causation and determinism. But for Alec/Eaves it is the source of hope: “It should be a source of hope, this lack of control. We are both responsible and absolutely unable to make our responsibility stay the way it should.” The justice system is supposed to limit someone’s freedom for the good of the society. But in case of Turing and Alec it has created more cruelty and unfairness. Alec sometimes thinks everything what happened to him is predetermined but he still have a choice if anything to reply with “Fair play, decency, humour, subtlety”.

As far as the evolving consciousness is concerned (AI or some other form) Alec says: “The price of consciousness, of power, is choice.” The choice to use power to do harm or “productive humility”. The lesson for the politicians.

The novel is incredibly moving in some parts. In equal measure or even more so, it also made me think about the level of abstraction i was not thinking since age 18. Thank you, Will Eaves.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

None of this fantasy, none of the objects in this inner room are memories or perceptions. They're neither past nor present, yet they form a kind of boundary. They're states of mind and real appearances and as I think of them they come closer, a book of mathematical puzzles next to the horrible pupa…

This is a fascinating and quite challenging novel, built around tone rather than incident. It's based on the later life of Alan Turing, though the main character is not Turing himself but rather ‘Alec Pryor’, whose inventedness presumably allows Will Eaves a little more creative leeway. The facts are the same, however: Pryor is undergoing enforced chemical castration, and struggling to reconcile his experience of breakdown with his understanding of materialist science and logic.

The drugs change his body and affect his mind, and large parts of the book recreate the dreams that Pryor has, in which he endlessly replays relationships, mistakes, humiliations, friendships, past traumas and possible futures. These sections are weird and oneiric, bristling with meaningful but obscure imagery, shifting time and person constantly so that you never know who is speaking, or when, or where, or to whom. People blend into one another, rooms and landscapes and perspectives morph alarmingly, in an almost Philip-K-Dickian way.

‘It may be that the feeling of free will which we all have is an illusion,’ Turing wrote. ‘Or it may be that we really have got free will, but yet there is no way of telling from our behaviour that this is so.’ Pryor, his personality eroded by state-sanctioned chemicals, finds himself staring into mirrors and wondering if the person looking back is really the same as ‘him’. Machines that can simulate a process of thinking are, in point of fact, thinking (he believes); but then are the people in his dreams really ‘thinking’? ‘Are we aware we live inside your dream?’ one of them asks him. ‘How do you know you're not like us? How can the real world tell if it is so, or not?’

These reflections on self-awareness have extra poignancy in the context of a novel, where they appear in the mouths of characters who could reasonably wonder the same thing vis-à-vis their author. At times, Alec becomes the narrator of the book, and is in turn almost elided with the author; characters suspect that they are unreal, and one is never entirely sure if they are worried about being dreamt by Alec Pryor or being written by Will Eaves. (‘But no one thinks a character inside a book has actually written it?’ demands one person significantly.)

In Eaves's hands, this dreamworld is genuinely eerie, with the queasy uncertain feeling of impending nightmare. The future is brilliantly intimated, including in one hallucinatory sequence where Pryor's mother turns into the Wicked Queen from Snow White (Alan Turing's favourite film), mixing up a potion with which to poison the kind of apple that Turing would one day eat. Mirrors and other reflective surfaces acquire sinister implications. Pryor meets children he has never had and never will have, who are terrified by their nonexistence:

‘I know you're thinking all these thoughts for me. But it feels like they're mine, and it's a funny feeling. Sometimes in the morning, when I look in the mirror – it's blank. I know that's how it's meant to be, but…I've begun to notice it! I think, “There it is, blank again.” This morning, when I got up, it was white, the blank…a sort of cloud forming, bulging, and now – I see – ’

‘What do you see?’

‘Something…I don't like it. Daddy!’

Yet when Pryor tries to console her with a hug, we read: ‘Her ragged breathing is the breathing of some perfect predator delivered from captivity into a vicarage.’ Eaves's writing is fantastic, and reflects a deep attempt to immerse readers in an experience of existential limbo. Despite how heartbreaking this can be, and how bleak at times (‘The depressed are onto something,’ Pryor notes), the overall impression is of human resilience and sympathy – not to mention creative virtuosity.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

UPDATE. Now re-read. In-between my two readings of this book, I read the biography of Alan Turing (Goodreads will not let me add a link to the book), "Alan Turing: The Enigma". On first reading, I gave Murmur 5 stars and noted that I thought it would need at least one more reading, probably more. I can now confirm that it benefits from a second reading and becomes even better than a mere 5 stars. Having only just finished reading the biography, I noticed a lot of details of Turing's life that are woven into the story. Some of the dream sequences are still difficult to read, but I find the best approach is to roll with the punches and keep moving forward: most of the time, the next letter from June brings some clarity to the message of the dream and the actual wording of the dream narratives is more about emotion and impression than it is about rationality (as is the way with dreams).

This goes straight back onto my re-read pile, although I can't just keep reading it over and over again, so I will probably read a few other things before I give it another go.

----------------
My sixth and final book from the Goldsmith’s shortlist. And I think I have a new favourite! This book is astonishing. There will be no quotes in this review because I was so absorbed in the book that I forgot to stop and take any notes.

Alan Turing has long been a hero of mine (how can you not admire a man who was pivotal in work that is estimated to have shortened World War II by up to 2 years and saved potentially 14 million lives?). I was incensed at the treatment of his life in the movie The Imitation Game, but this book is an entirely different kettle of fish. It is not an easy book to read (quite the opposite, in fact), but it is sensitively and beautifully written. I can’t claim to have understood all of it, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t moved almost to tears at several points, partly by the circumstances of Turing’s life (the section towards the end where he imagines an alternative life with children is heartbreaking) and partly by the elegance of Eaves’ writing.

Note that Turing does not actually appear by name in this book. He is replaced by Alec Pryor, a sort of “alternative version” of Turing. Other key players in the story appear with different names, too. But this is appropriate as the story is very much concerned with doubles, mirror images (as was Cusk’s Kudos, as I noticed when I recently re-read it). The narrator is sometimes Pryor and sometimes Pryor’s mirror image (literally his reflection acting independently). And although this sounds weird, it works here because Pryor also sometimes steps completely outside of himself. So, we have Pryor who is not quite Turing and a narrator who is not quite Pryor.

All this paves the way for some startling writing about consciousness and artificial intelligence. Of course, Turing’s other claim to fame is as the father of AI.

In a summary, the book might not sound all that appealing: we are, for the most part, inhabiting Pryor’s (Turing’s) consciousness and his hallucinatory visions during his enforced “therapy” when he was convicted of gross indecency for homosexual acts that were at that time illegal in the UK (in real life, Turing was granted a posthumous pardon in 2013). The therapy consisted mainly of injections of hormones to reduce libido, a chemical castration. In his drugged and depressed state, Pryor heads back into his past and we read about his dreams and hallucinations. The narrative also includes the text of letters exchange between Pryor and a woman called June who he almost married (these aren’t quite what they appear to be, though). There is no linear timeline and it is sometimes hard to be sure of the viewpoint of the narrator: the confusion that results mirrors the confusion in Pryor’s/Turing’s mind through the year of his “treatment”.

Although it might sound as though it is going to be depressing, it is actually simply very moving. It is notable that there is very little bitterness in Pryor, no railing against his punishment, and this makes the story all the more emotional. And Eaves’ writing is often very visual, painting surreal and vivid images in the readers’ mind (as I spend my days taking photographs, this might partly explain my strong positive response to the writing style): in one example, Pryor as a boy puts on a deer’s skull and stands in the light of the rising sun.

This is a book that demands a second (and probably third and fourth reading). It promises new discoveries and increasing depth with each re-read and I think this is one of the reasons I loved it so much. It is the kind of book I could take to a desert island because I know I would not get tired of re-reading it.

You might have guessed by now that I rather liked it.

[Doug · Rating 2 out of 5]

Update 3/29/2018: So the fact this tied for the RoC prize (with Lucia, which I have a copy of, but haven't read yet) makes me feel vindicated that I stopped reading the longlist after last year. Although I cheer the prize's intent to call attention to UK small presses, I found most of the entries like this one - tedious and practically unreadable - there IS a reason larger presses were uninterested. :-(

2.5, rounded down.

Like most people, what little I know of Alan Turing came from the film 'The Imitation Game' (as well as a play covering the same period, 'Breaking the Code', starring Derek Jacobi). Therefore, I found this Goldsmith Prize nominee to be comprehensible and fairly accessible for the half of it that followed that same template. Unfortunately, the other half I found to be incomprehensible gibberish, as it (intentionally) becomes a nightmarish mishmash of dreams, fantasies and notions, ostensibly brought on (if I have this right - and lord knows I may not!) by his subjection to 'chemical castration' as punishment for gross indecency (i.e, homosexuality). As with my previous encounter with Eaves (The Absent Therapist), I found these sections tedious and almost willfully pretentious, as if the author were thumbing his nose at his audience to even dare parse any meaning from it.

[Jill S · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book a little bit beautiful and sad, but mostly pompous and confusing. It's a shame when a writer gets in their own way and detracts from a touching story. The beginning is very compelling, and I also enjoyed the letters between Alec and June. However, I felt like I spent most of this book trying to untangle metaphors and allegories and it was exhausting and ultimately not worth it. Here's a passage, for example, that I re-read a few times and asked myself: WTF is the point of this at all?

But now I pass around the Pryor room, I see that I am made from it. Its windows are my eyes (dark now, or blind), the thin striped mattress and the shelves of books my diaphragm and ribs, the whole material space a mind arising from such things quite naturally, a geometry that shifts and is itself the act of observing.

Boy, you are trying. too. hard.

I'm sure there are people who will love this book, but those people are not me.

[Maddie C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murmur is a feat of a novel, so huge in scope and meaning, there was something to unveil in every chapter, a need to ponder every word and understand why it was there; because of it, it’s likely one of those books that “deserves” the “difficult read” stamp but, that, in my humble opinion, those are usually the books that bare fruit in the end. And oh, Murmur is an apple tree with ripe apples ready for plucking.

In it we follow Alec Pryor, a cryptanalyst working for british intelligence during the second world war, who has just been convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to undertake hormonal treatment and jungian therapy (instead of serving time in jail, since homosexuality was considered a criminal offense in the 50s). If any of this sounds familiar, it is because Will Eaves took great inspiration from the life of british mathematician Alan Turing -- basically, Eaves has created an “avatar” of Turing in Alec, while still retaining some creative license by changing a few names and events (it is also incredibly meaningful to the story that Alec isn’t really Turing). (I found knowing a bit about Turing’s life and work helped me understand certain aspects of the story but I only went so far as to read the Wikipedia on him, so I would say extensive knowledge and research isn’t needed in order to understand and appreciate the extension of the story).

Divided into three parts, the first one is filled with straight-forward journal entries in which Alec muses on a number of different subjects such as the human condition, god & religion, the *** of power in relationships and society’s need for conformism and rules.

“Here is a double strife: the sleeping death of duty—expectation, manners—and the waking inner life.”

There’s a lot to unpack right away and many of the subjects introduced in this first part will weave through the rest of the novel but it is in the second part that things start to get a bit more… experimental (weird, even), with the description of dreams; and as is the nature of dreams to be nonsensical and distorted, everything is not as straightforward as the first part but, I thought Eaves is kind to its readers by trying to give them some direction with letters that Alec exchanges with his friend June, where they discuss and try to uncover the meaning behind these dreams.

Taking from the life of Alan Turing, it would be impossible not to mention artificial intelligence and robotics, and that theme is often approached by the narrator, precisely when thinking about human intelligence and the possible existence of it in other beings other than humans, and how that can lead to the erasure of “originality” (something the human race is very much obsessed with).

“The fear of robots, I take it, is like the fear of prophecy, the essence of which is repetition: if you can be repeated, you can be replaced.”

There are constant symbols throughout the novel, such as the apple and the mirror, both nods to folk and fairy tales, of which Turing was a big fan of, and that, just like in those old stories, uncover something much deeper than is first let on -- they uncover the key themes of nature of identity and the fracturing of the self, as we learn that while Alec undergoes his treatment, he is faced with deep physical changes that lead him to question who he really is, raising the very old question of “am I still the same inside if I look so different on the outside?”.

“One is turned back on oneself and in the process one sees a second person, a new person whom one does not fully recognize.”

It is an heartbreaking imagining of what might have gone through an historical figure’s head during dehumanizing moments but it is also a deeply thoughtful meditation of human nature and society’s cruelty and compliance with heinous crimes and sentiments that often only ring true to a restricted number of people.

“When I was changed—treated—I found out two odd things. One was a source of mild comfort. I found that I could still be me, somewhere inside my head, when I was physically changing. The other was quite horrible and no comfort at all: when I began to look better, like my old self, after the changing treatment stopped, I seemed to disappear from the inside. I felt as if I’d been replaced. I heard myself saying to everyone how well I felt, how everything was on the up… (...) I felt I still knew, in some way, what had been done to me, but there was now another me, speaking for me, out of my altered or remodeled shape, who mindlessly agreed with everything the doctors said. I’d always thought that, in my line of work, a thing that acts like something, must be it, someone who behaves plausibly is plausibly the product of their behaviors. But I was wrong. You can be changed—tortured, in fact—so that the person other people go on talking to just isn’t you. You’ve gone away. Your body’s holding wide the door, but you are in a very different dark chamber.”

Please read it because, I can’t do it justice. This goes straight to the ‘best books ever’ pile.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ARC IN 2018. THANKS!

Winner of the 2019 WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE!

The problem with disguising or encrypting is that the original still exists. One has doubled the information, not made it less sensitive. Something has happened to it, but the semantic loaf persists behind a mask, a veil, a foreign accent, new papers, breasts etc., and really the only thing to do about that, if you’re still anxious, is to remove both bits of information - the original and the encryption- altogether.

That quote should tell you if this trip is one you wish to take. Eaves's narrative choices are all right there, as is the chosen PoV of third-person limited. From the chapter-opening quotes selected from Turing's voluminous writings to the damning if underplayed social commentary, the whole is of a piece and gleams like the gem it is.

So why only four stars? Because it's been fictionalized, and the elision and compression inherent in that act (I've typed "of vandalism" three times and erased it four) seldom sits well with me. Even when, as now, I recognize that the author is seeking (and mostly finding) a Deeper Truth, it...feels like a cheapening of this tragedy. BUT YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY READ IT!!

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“This is the death of one viewpoint, and its rebirth, like land rising above the waves, or sea foam running off a crowded deck: the odd totality of persons each of whom says ‘me’.” When I first tried reading Murmur, I enjoyed the first-person “Part One: Journal,” which was originally a stand-alone story (shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2017) but got stuck on “Part Two: Letters and Dreams” and ended up just giving the rest of the book a brief skim. I’m glad that the book’s shortlisting prompted me to return to it and give it proper consideration because, although it was a challenge to read, it was well worth it.

Eaves’s protagonist, Alec Pryor, sometimes just “the scientist,” is clearly a stand-in for Alan Turing, quotes from whom appear as epigraphs heading most chapters. Turing was a code-breaker and early researcher in artificial intelligence at around the time of the Second World War, but was arrested for homosexuality and subjected to chemical castration. Perhaps due to his distress at his fall from grace and the bodily changes that his ‘treatment’ entailed, he committed suicide at age 41 – although there are theories that it was an accident or an assassination. If you’ve read about the manner of his death, you’ll find eerie hints in Murmur.

Every other week, Alec meets with Dr Anthony Stallbrook, a psychoanalyst who encourages him to record his dreams and feelings. This gives rise to the book’s long central section. As is common in dreams, people and settings whirl in and out in unpredictable ways, so we get these kinds of flashes: sneaking out from the boathouse at night with his schoolboy friend, Chris Molyneux, who died young; anti-war protests at Cambridge; having sex with men; going to a fun fair; confrontations with his mother and brother; and so on. Alec and his interlocutors discuss the nature of time, logic, morality, and the threat of war.

There are repeated metaphors of mirrors, gold and machines, and the novel’s language is full of riddles and advanced vocabulary (volutes, manumitted, pseudopodium) that sometimes require as much deciphering as Turing’s codes. The point of view keeps switching, too, as in the quote I opened with: most of the time the “I” is Alec, but sometimes it’s another voice/self observing from the outside, as in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. There are also fragments of second- and third-person narration, as well as imagined letters to and from June Wilson, Alec’s former Bletchley Park colleague and fiancée. All of these modes of expression are ways of coming to terms with the past and present.

I am usually allergic to any book that could be described as “experimental,” but I found Murmur’s mosaic of narrative forms an effective and affecting way of reflecting its protagonist’s identity crisis. There were certainly moments where I wished this book came with footnotes, or at least an Author’s Note that would explain the basics of Turing’s situation. (Is Eaves assuming too much about readers’ prior knowledge?) For more background I recommend The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing.

To my surprise, given my initial failure to engage with Murmur, it is now my favorite to win the Wellcome Book Prize. For one thing, it’s a perfect follow-on from last year’s winner, To Be a Machine. (“It is my fate to make machines that think,” Alec writes.) For another, it connects the main themes of this year’s long- and shortlists: mental health and sexuality. In particular, Alec’s fear that in developing breasts he’s becoming a sexual hybrid echoes the three books from the longlist that feature trans issues. Almost all of the longlisted books could be said to explore the mutability of identity to some extent, but Murmur is the very best articulation of that. A playful, intricate account of being in a compromised mind and body, it’s written in arresting prose. Going purely on literary merit, this is my winner by a mile.

(Will Eaves is an associate professor in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick and a former arts editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Murmur, his fourth novel, was also shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize and was the joint winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize. He has also published poetry and a hybrid memoir.)

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murmur, by Will Eaves, is a stunningly original imagining of how the mathematician Alan Turing may have responded to the punishment imposed on him by the state – chemical castration – following his conviction for gross indecency. It is a mingling of self-awareness and dreams, both fascinating and heart-breaking. It is a study of what it means to be conscious within a world where understanding of another’s inner being remains out of reach.

Alan Turing was more than just a member of the team that cracked the wartime Enigma code using a machine akin to an early computer, impressive though this achievement may be. He was a mathematician and theoretical biologist who pioneered ideas on artificial intelligence.

Murmur opens with the events that led to his trial. His punishment was administered over the course of a year during which he attended a hospital for weekly injections and met fortnightly with a sympathetic psychoanalyst.

“Dr Stallbrook often asks me how I feel. I reply that I do not know. How does one feel? It is one of the imponderables. I am better equipped to say what it is that I feel, and that is mysterious enough. For I feel that I am a man stripped of manhood, a being but not a body. Like the Invisible Man, I put on clothes to give myself a stable form. I’m at some point of disclosure between the real and the abstract – changing and shifting, trying to stay close to the transformation, not to flee it.”

“much of life is a pointless algorithm, an evolutionary process without an interpreter.”

The narrator muses on the kindly nurse doing her job to the best of her ability whilst taking no responsibility for the effects of the drugs on her patient – the suffering and wasted potential.

“Soldiers are permitted to kill each other and are maddened, sooner or later, by the realisation that someone else, somewhere relatively comfortable, thinks this is the right thing for them to do.”

The author names his protagonist Alec Pryce – he has stated that he did not wish to put imagined words into the mouth of a genius who in reality existed.

In the second and longest section of the book, Alec exchanges letters with June (the author’s name for the real Joan Clarke), a trusted friend he was once engaged to. They discuss Alec’s changing condition during his treatment with mutual fondness and candour. Between these letters are details of vivid dreams Alec suffers – a mixing of events from his past, present and future.

Alec is exploring his reactions to the changes wrought on his body – the shrivelling and burning away, the growth of fatty deposits on hips and breasts. The harrowing pain he suffers is both physical and mental. In one exchange he describes what he is becoming as a freak. He remains curious and stoic but fears that what he is losing is his sense of self – that his mind will be irrevocably changed.

“Somehow it is the case that the mind arises from a biology and a physics to which it may not return. That is what I mean when I say that we won’t know what machines are thinking once they start to think. We won’t know because once consciousness has come about, it looks out of different eyes.”

The narrative is devastatingly effective at conveying the pain of losing what one is and values about one’s self. Those responsible for Alec’s care show more prosaic concerns, failing to understand the essence of what their patient is going through.

“It’s all about the “how” they get you stable […] “How would you cope? How would you pay for that?” Nothing about the who – the who is left. To deal with this. […] What will be left of you.”

“they’re treating me as if I’ve gone away or been exchanged and will not ever really understand again.”

Alec dreams of futures now lost. He has been tortured, altered. As others congratulate themselves and each other on what they have made, what is left of the old finds they do not wish to live in the new. It is not them.

“When I began to look better, like my old self, after the changing treatment stopped, I seemed to disappear from the inside. I felt as if I’d been replaced.”

I pondered the wider message of how society continues to demand that all conform, encouraging rejection of those who resist.

Alec imagines his essence as an inner room that he furnishes with memories and objects he is free to choose. This freedom exists because the room will never be seen by others. Ultimately each person lives alone, something that parents struggle with in their desire to help and guide offspring.

“nothing is guaranteed by education; nothing is assured; of how I am, and always was”

The work Alec has done with machines, his belief that one day they will achieve consciousness, relies on the development of algorithms for thought as well as behaviour.

“Therein lies a conundrum for thinking machines. They can do nothing by halves. In theory, they will be made to remember everything, and with such a lot to remember they might not grasp how important it is, sometimes, for persons to forget.”

This is an exceptional novel that gets to the core of what it means to be a conscious member of a conformist society. Piercing yet beautifully written, it is an intelligent and recommended read.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murmur is undoubtedly one of the most difficult books I have ever read. That’s difficult as in the recognition that significant swathes if the text were incomprehensible to me.
I still give this book four stars and applaud the writer’s ambition, the creativity of the storytelling, the innate quality of the prose.

My thoughts fall into three categories:
(1) Murmur will please readers whose interest in Alan Turing’s (remarkable) life has already been whetted. Murmur is a deeply intelligent, deeply researched novel. The layering of fiction on top of easily identifiable real life people and events appeals to lovers of historical fiction (in which I include myself). At a most basic level Murmur is a more intellectual companion to the Benedict Cumberbatch starred “imitation Game”, the American 2014 Academy Award winning movie.
The combination of demonstrable genius applied to the betterment of mankind (the Enigma code), coupled with the tragic betrayal of Alan Turing, is a compelling, if ghastly, story. Murmur taps into that tragedy, and by taking the reader to what might have been terrible mental anguish, the book fulfils its ambition, on one level.
As an aside, the structure of the book is very similar in concept, and execution, to another great book coming out of a small press ( Lucia by Alex Pheby, from Galley Beggar)
Alan Turing, and Lucia Joyce’s stories are told with greater licence than allowable in a straight memoir, via fictional contemporaries. In both cases the author is able to express their personal disquiet and distress at the injustices heaped upon their subjects.

(2) Murmur is written with a multitude of obscure references and word plays that will reward vigilant research by the reader. This is particularly appropriate given Turing’s wartime detective work.
Bits that I think I connected included:
- Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the way in which love persists through bodily transformation
- The Brains Trust: Julian Huxley and Cyril Joad the human ability to learn is determined by “appetites, desires, drives, instincts”.. ecological genetics, polymorphism. The diversity in small bivalve molluscs. Eugenics sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics
- ”I am the Red Lady of Paviland” (56). The male Upper Paleolithic partial skeleton dyed in red ochre and buried in Britain 33,000 BP. The bones were discovered in 1823 and subsequently the gender was found to have been incorrectly identified.

(3) Murmur, to quote the Man Booker Prize 2018 judges chairman , Murmur is ‘difficult’
Notwithstanding the joys of background research; and my efforts to get inside Will Eaves’s thinking- there were ultimately so many references that I couldn’t fathom out, that I found the book frustrating. It’s my lack of infinite knowledge of mathematical theory, and of Artificial Intelligence, that stymied my best endeavours to dig deeper. I am now aware of a number of philosophical/mathematical concepts, but I’m none the wiser if asked to coherently discuss them:
- Regular Division of the Plane. A series of drawings by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher from 1936.
- The images are based on the principle of tessellation “the contours of one form fit perfectly the contours of another”(6)
• Bertrand Russell’s neutral monism
• Schrodinger’s theory of consciousness

Various characters morphed and merged into one another. Dr Julius Trentham appears on multiple, seemingly linked occasions. (Turings father was Julius Mathieson Turing?)

One reference in Murmur particularly intrigued (and frustrated) me.
A mob of crows was discovered dead in meadow (seventeen in total) – “autopsies” were carried out and they were found to have died of old age. (10). I can find no record of such an event, nor any symbolism associated with such a phenomenon.
What my research did reveal is that an autopsy is not performed on animals. Its called a necropsy

Maybe I should seek out a reading group and aim to revisit Murmur before too long.

[Malene Clementsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not an easy book to read, it felt like a book my old literature professor (who loves a good complicated book) would make me read for class. You are in the mind of Alec (based on the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing) during his chemical castration, where his mind and body start changing and you are sent into his spiralling hallucinations and dislocated dreams and fantasies. The book is a combination of his journal entries and letters between himself and June, his ex-fiancée.

The book is more or less one big stream of consciousness, something I am not usually a fan of...but, there is something about Murmur that made me want to read on. Even though I found it annoying and confusing at times tbh, there was still some logic to all the tumbling thoughts - but I still do not think I have understood what the book is trying to teach me...I am thinking this takes more than one read to really appreciate and I am not sure I am going to do that.

All this being said, there were some beautifully written passages, Eaves is quite the poetic genius, and that is one of the things that made me want to read on. Two of my favourite passages are:

"Refuse all possibilities. Let go of all, where all is none. I used to be so capable, but I am changing; I've already changed, and find myself instead drawn to the episodic and semantic mode - the ancient tool, of speaking thought."

"I miss my mother terribly. I miss my other selves I took for granted, youth and bravery. I know with certainty that when I see people in dreams - people I've never met whom I know to be close friends - my mind is not playing a trick, it's sorting possibilities. I hear myself say, 'Just imagine how it used to be.'"

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book features fictional protagonist Alec Pryor, a stand-in for Alan Turing. It portrays the decline in mental functioning during “treatments” he received after his conviction for indecency, which was illegal in Great Britain at the time. Like Turing, Pryor is a mathematical and scientific genius, and this book takes a look at the protagonist’s attempt to understand the theory behind his appalling treatment regimen. It combines elements of psychology, philosophy, and social commentary.

I very much appreciated the first part of this book, in the form of Pryor’s journal, which sets the stage for the following chapters, which contain a number of dream sequences and letters to and from June, a woman that Pryor almost married (and for which there is a counterpart in Turing’s life). There are many references to consciousness and artificial intelligence, two of Pryor’s (and Turing’s) primary topics of interest.

This is a creative endeavor that does not adhere to any typical expectations of a traditional noveI. I think it succeeds as a portrait of how an extremely intelligent mind might work under stress. It is intentionally fragmented, but unfortunately, these types of fragments interrupt the flow and do not always make sense without researching details of Turing’s background. I can recommend this book to those who already possess more than a cursory knowledge of the life of Alan Turing.

“It strikes me that a mirror reflects, but that, geometrically speaking, it transforms rather than translates. One is turned back on oneself and in the process one sees a second person, a new person whom one does not fully recognize. Always uncanny, this about-facing, and not unrelated to the common fear of automation, which people assume to be a sort of coming doom. The fear of robots, I take it, is like the fear of prophecy, the essence of which is repetition: if you can be repeated, you can be replaced.”

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is obviously based upon the later life of Alan Turing – even though he is called Alec Prior in the book. Mainly, these are meditations, dreams and musings, of a man who has been found guilty of gross indecency and is subjected to a year of hormone injections, as well as counselling sessions with a psychoanalyst.

We hear of the young man, Cyril, who Prior met at a fairground. The encounter leading to his downfall with the law. Of his thoughts on school friend, Christopher, whose presence – and early death - haunts him. Of June, who he proposes to and who remains his loyal correspondent.

This is said to be a challenging read, but I did not find it so. Although some of it was difficult; such as reading Turing’s response to his changing body, there is also a lot of dark humour. June’s visit to Turing/Prior’s mother, and brother, was excruciatingly embarrassing and evoked wonderfully.

Turing is not only a hero of mine, but certainly a national hero. The fact that he was treated so shoddily is appalling and it is a shame that he could not see how much his work at Bletchley Park was later appreciated and admired. I have been lucky enough to visit Bletchley and see Turing’s office, such as it was. Will Eaves seems to capture the character of Turing and I found this an impressive read.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alec Pryor finds a man, Cyril, that he picks up at a fairground and manages to persuade him to come home for the night. He offers payment and Cyril refuses to accept, but Pryor realises that £3 has been taken. He contacts him and Cyril returns to the home, where they have a row. A few days later he comes home to find that £10 has been taken and contacts him again, Cyril thinks it might be a friend of his. Pryor goes to the police with the story and they fingerprint the house and it turns out to be this associate. He is picked up by the police and when he is questioned tells them of the liaison between Alec and Cyril. Alec Pryor is charged with gross indecency.

He is forced to agree to a series of injections that are a chemical castration, the cure of the time, for homosexuality. As these hormones start to change his body from a lean runner into something that feels unreal, he begins to dream of past and present events. Some are relieved with the stark emotions from the time, others have a more surreal horror to them. Other dreams are about the future of AI and how that will overlap with human consciousness. Interwoven with the dreams and the correspondence he has with June, a lady he almost married, but chose not to as he didn’t want a marriage just for show.

Even though the protagonist is called Alec, this is a pseudonym for the brilliant mathematician and code breaker, Alan Turing. There were parts of this book that I liked, for example, the letters back and forwards between Alec and June, but the dreamlike states in the second part of the book are as complex as they are confusing a lot of the time. I did struggle with it, and at times I really couldn’t get along with it. That said, Eaves is obviously a writer of some talent and I think it will be worth exploring some of his other work. May even give this a re-read at some point.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written and intelligent work. This is a brave reimagining of the inner consciousness of Alan Turing following his conviction for gross indecency in 1952 and his choice of sentencing in lieu of prison to a course of weekly hormonal injections intended to reduce his libido, or chemical castration, over the course of a year. In 1954, Turing was found dead of cyanide poisoning by his housekeeper with a half-eaten apple by his side. It was speculated that the apple was laced with cyanide, while the apple wasn't tested for the poison, due to his enchantment with Snow White.

Part One of Murmur, Journal, was shortlisted for the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award which sets out the fictionalized circumstances of the at that time illegal tryst with a young man in his home. Alec Pryor (Turing) was discovered for his wrongdoing by reporting a burglary to the police brought on by the young man when the police came to fingerprint his home. This chapter also delves into his childhood friendship with Christopher (Morcom), his "first love", at boarding school and their misadventure of a nighttime trespassing into a private orchard and garden house, swimming across a lake. Christopher was already sick having contracted bovine tuberculosis some years before, and the lake crossing only made him sicker, causing his parents to remove him from school and place him in a sanatorium where he soon after passed away. This was a devastating blow to Turing, losing his greatest friend and math and science influencer.

Part Two, Letters and Dreams, imagines Alec Pryor's fantastical dreams and his fictional correspondence with June Wilson whom he worked with at Bletchley years before. In these letters, she is seeking to help him through his fear and pain to make sense of his strange dreams while he is undergoing the weekly treatment at the Naval Infirmary. Alec also regularly visits his appointed psychoanalyst, Dr. Stallbrook, during his sessions. His dreams consistently recall the childhood trespassing incident with his friend Christopher with Dr. Stallbrook as his headmaster. He views people as cartoons and conceptualizes Snow White images of scrying mirrors, dwarves, and evil witches around his mother and brother. He dreams of smart computers and the population's fear of thinking machines taking over. He worries over his changing body due to the hormones.

Lastly, Part Three returns to his Journal, following the conclusion of his treatment and his attempt to return to everyday life.

I found this to be emotional and psychologically impactful. A very interesting read.

[Ingrid Wassenaar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murmur weaves a dense, painful, difficult story around Alan Turing's tragic life. Particularly disorienting are Will Eaves's descriptions of altered brain states while the central character, Alec, is undergoing hormone treatment – chemical castration – to 'treat' his homosexuality. These hallucinatory episodes read like Lautréamont, and inspire nausea and pity in equal amounts.

One startling thought that occurred to me was that, although my lived experience is very far from that of an isolated gay male mathematician and builder of learning machines, there was one uncanny and striking avenue of identification: the hormonal torments of menopause. Through that lens, the hallucinatory episodes came to seem familiar as descriptions of anxiety, depression, worry, and grief, all of which arise in menopause, and add to the confusion of this natural hormonal alteration.

Murmur is not for the fainthearted, and no beach read. But it is a poetic meditation that quietly asks to be read carefully and savouringly, and then it yields up its immense riches: as a thought experiment, which both obliquely illuminates the extraordinarily difficult idea of machines as capable of consciousness, and constantly demonstrates the crucial importance of *language* in getting at what it means to think at all. This constant feathering motion, combing across numeracy and logic with poetics, delivers an unexpected, and profoundly moving tribute to Turing. Bravo.

[Trudie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a challenging book to read - dream states, machine learning, chemical castration, so heavy on literary and scientific allusions that a Cambridge education might come in handy.
However, Murmur lured me in with its opening, which is based on the events leading to Alan Turing's indecency conviction in 1951 and the state-mandated injections of a synthetic oestrogen. From there, it becomes a book of hallucinations from a genius mind, partially explained by letters, but more easily interpreted if the reader is familiar with Turing’s biography ( the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sequence makes more sense after a brief read of Wikipedia).
This is a class of book where to "enjoy" it is to let it wash over you like poetry and accept that, upon a first read, it's occasionally impenetrable. What kept me going was both the startling originality and beauty of the writing and the constant background hum of Turing's thoughts on machine consciousness.

Quotes :
A chemical postman sorting his blood finds sacks of hate mail for each tissue cell
( although this is taken from a poem by W.H. Auden )

The thirty lives in this cold room, seen from some distant vantage point are like the hopeful lanterns of a struggling ferry

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is obviously based upon the later life of Alan Turing – even though he is called Alec Prior in the book. Mainly, these are meditations, dreams and musings, of a man who has been found guilty of gross indecency and is subjected to a year of hormone injections, as well as counselling sessions with a psychoanalyst.

We hear of the young man, Cyril, who Prior met at a fairground. The encounter leading to his downfall with the law. Of his thoughts on school friend, Christopher, whose presence – and early death - haunts him. Of June, who he proposes to and who remains his loyal correspondent.

This is said to be a challenging read, but I did not find it so. Although some of it was difficult; such as reading Turing’s response to his changing body, there is also a lot of dark humour. June’s visit to Turing/Prior’s mother, and brother, was excruciatingly embarrassing and evoked wonderfully.

Turing is not only a hero of mine, but certainly a national hero. The fact that he was treated so shoddily is appalling and it is a shame that he could not see how much his work at Bletchley Park was later appreciated and admired. I have been lucky enough to visit Bletchley and see Turing’s office, such as it was. Will Eaves seems to capture the character of Turing and I found this an impressive read.

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

With a poetic voice all his own, Will Eaves uses "Murmur" to tell the story of a fictional Alan Turing after his conviction for being homosexual.

Alec Pryor, a fictional substitute for Alan Turing in all but name, is convicted of committing homosexual acts after he goes to the police to report being burglared by a former lover. As punishment for his heinous crimes he is given weekly hormone injections that, among other things, cause his body to change - becoming more feminine - and cause him to have constant hallucinations. "Murmur" is an account, through Pryor's journals and unsent letters, of surviving this tortuous punishment.

You might be wondering, then, why I would give a seemingly interesting and novel story such a low rating. Eaves writing, though clever and moving and poetic throughout, is unnecessarily opaque, and it is clear that he knows it to be so because the "letters" included at the end of each chapter exist purely to give a translation of the almost impenetrable accounts of the hallucinations that pepper the prior pages. Had the writing been even a bit more clear this book would have been remarkable, but, sadly, it wasn't.

[Eddie Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tricky one. It’s a fictional take on Alan Turing’s tragic life - and whilst specific and detailed doesn’t at all attempt to gently educate the reader in the manner of most fictionalised biography. The novel assumes total familiarity with Turing’s life. You will need to swot up before opening this book or prepare to be confused and frustrated.

The novel is experimental and pushes boundaries. One of its modernist forebears is Virginia Woolf - if Woolf’s modernist project was predicated on ‘stream of consciousness’, Eaves here questions what consciousness actually is. The results are quite surreal - magical realism meshed with mathematical & philosophical conjecture.

I was impressed with the innovative way Eaves uses figures of speech and symbols as levers to jolt his narrative forward & backwards chronologically. He pulls off an emotionally heart-rending conclusion. I thought the novel an interesting take on Turing, but one that is perhaps a little too clever for its own good.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been an admirer of Will Eave's work for a number of years. This novel which takes a deeply internal look into the mind of character whose life and fate shadows that of Alan Turning is a bold and masterful achievement.
A longer review and personal reflection can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2018/10/24/di...

[Anna Baillie-Karas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bracing read. This was unnerving to read so is hard to review, but I admired it and think it’s a beautiful work that will stay with me.

Alec Pryor (inspired by Alec Turing) undergoes chemical castration which changes his body and affects his mind. (He views it not as losing his mind but as changing).

It gives a wonderful insight into how his mind shifts from lucid thoughts and ideas - for example, about artificial intelligence, the privacy of our thoughts, and free will - to dreams and hallucinations. It’s challenging, as it jumps in time, characters morph & the line between memory & dreams is blurred.

I loved his letters with June (based on Turing’s friend Joan) - partly because of their great friendship and dry wit, but also because these felt real - two adults conversing about his treatment. Although at one point I questioned everything and wondered if the other scenes were real and the letters were two machines writing as Alec and Joan. (This is the effect the book has on you!).

The writing is beautiful: clean, poetic and full of humour and compassion.

There are references to Snow White (Turing’s favourite tale) and apple and mirror motifs run through the story.

It also picks up on theories that MI6 might have wanted him dead (“I am now a nuisance”) and Alec considers the reason for this - because “you can’t force someone to conform. ... you can’t reach the inner life.” This picks up on his earlier ideas about the privacy of our thoughts (in the context of inventing machines that think and knowing what each other is thinking).

It’s full of interesting ideas like this and rewards slow reading.

[Ian Mond · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Francisco Salgueira · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Se ao menos pudéssemos crer que somos não mais do que carbono e água, podíamos sair da vida sem grande drama, mas é precisamente nessa crença que reside o problema.”

[Min Trong Suốt・透明みん · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Turing, một người anh hùng tôi hết mực ngưỡng mộ và cũng dồi dào lòng quan tâm tới vụ tự sát của ông ta được Will Eaves thâm nhập và tái hiện với một danh tính song song khác là Alec Pryor. Quả thực với sự nhuần nhuyễn thực ảo, chà, bao gồm cả quá khứ hiện tại của sự thực, và hai mặt một tấm gương của cuốn tiểu thuyết đầy tuyệt vời này, thì Will Eaves thật sự quá chắc tay để kéo tôi đi du hành các giấc mơ, các chiều không gian, các sự thực được bẻ cong vênh tới rối loạn. "Con vật nhuyễn thể khổng lồ gầm gừ". Mọi thứ được xoay mòng nhưng khiến người đọc nhập tâm vào chính sức ám ảnh Turing của Will Eaves. Ông ta đã viết cuốn sách này trong bao lâu, mà có thể khiến nó ổn thoả tới thế? Phải chăng đúng là Will Eaves cũng ám ảnh Turing nhưng một cách hoà trộn bản thể. Thật quá đỗi bất ngờ, khi tất cả bản thể trong đó đều tách rời, nhưng cũng là một, một cách dễ làm con người ta trở nên phấn khíchh. Quả thực thì ông ta cũng khiến tôi nhớ tới điển tích "Trang Chu mộng hồ điệp" trong "Nam Hoa Kinh", ý tả Trang Chu mơ thấy mình bay lượn thoả thích với hình hài một con bướm, tới mức quên mất mình là Chu; không rõ thực hư mình là bướm hay Chu nữa. Đúng hỗn thực làm tôi thoả mãn.

Murmur - hay âm thanh rù quến của máu chảy qua tim một cách gấp gáp - khớp một cách hoàn hảo với dòng chảy phấp phới giữa thực và ảo này.

Mọi sự biến hoá dòng chảy trong cuốn tiểu thuyết, bao gồm các bản thể, các bức thư, các cuộc hội thoại đều diễn ra một cách trơn tru tới khó lường, đậm đặc như một liều độc dược

Có một sự so sánh đầy thú vị trong cuốn sách, ấy là chiếc gương thần của bà phủ thuỷ trong truyện cổ tích Nàng Bạch Tuyết. Tấm gương ấy đã cho bà ta tất cả những thứ bà ta muốn biết, nhưng đồng thời cũng nói dối bà ta về cái chết của Bạch Tuyết. Lòng trung thành bay biến một cách khôi hài ẩn dụ cho những cá thể ngọ nguậy liên tục trong Alec Pryor.

Cuối cùng, cách dẫn dắt của Will Eaves quá đỗi tuyệt vời. 🙌

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book last week -- and then immediately re-read it, based on the advice of other reviewers. What a beautifully written exploration of science, consciousness, and (in)humanity. I would like to say more about this book, but I don't think I could do it justice. Suffice it to say that Murmur is a fantastic read and a fitting tribute to Alan Turing.