Will Eaves

This is a somewhat dreamy and confusing book. I was aware of it as being about Alan Turing and expected something more like a straight novelistic re-telling of his story. Its not that, its a story about a man called Alec who has a lot in common with Alan Turing. I'm not sure that quite succeeded for me, I felt a little frustrated at not knowing what was grounded in fact and what was pure invention. The story is told in memories, letters, journal entries and we get glimpses of mathematical genius as well as personal relationships. The writing is lyrical and thoughtful and once i had adjusted my expectation of what I was getting I enjoyed it.… (more)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Murmur, a hallucinatory masterwork, Will Eaves invites us into the brilliant mind of Alec Pryor, a character inspired by Alan Turing. Turing, father of artificial intelligence and pioneer of radical new techniques to break the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II, was later persecuted by the British state for “gross indecency with another male” and forced to undergo chemical castration. Set during the devastating period before Turing’s suicide, Murmur evokes an extraordinary life, the beauty and sorrows of love, and the nature of consciousness.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ARC IN 2018. THANKS!

Winner of the 2019 WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE!

My Review: First, read this:
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!!… (more)

This is a tough one. The prose is gorgeous, and it often felt like I was reading poetry more than prose, but the dreamlike sections combined with the disjointedness of the narrative made for a tough read in terms of content, and if I hadn't known what the book was loosely about, I think I might have been mostly lost. As it is, I appreciated the language and the intent, and could even understand what it seemed the author was going for, but I didn't enjoy this as much as I would have liked and probably wouldn't recommend it.… (more)

Book, Film & Music Reviews from the 2019 RoC Prize Co-Winner
Review of the CB Editions paperback edition (October 2020)

I found this collection of reviews and essays to be very entertaining as it covered various media such as action adventure films from the mid-90's (James Bond Goldeneye 1995, Executive Decision 1996, Titanic 1997) to contemporary poetry and fiction and even some classics such as Homer's Odyssey. There was even a quirky parallel between book & film with Odysseus telling the Cyclops that his name was "Nobody" in Homer and analyst Curt Russell tells the lead terrorist the same thing in Executive Action.

The writer is also the novelist of Murmur, which was the co-winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize and one of the essays also discusses his work on that book, which is a fictionalized version of the real-life story of the persecution of Enigma Code breaker Alan Turing, who was homosexual at a time when it was illegal in Great Britain.

I read Broken Consort as the October 2020 Book of the Month perk from my support of The Republic of Consciousness Prize for small independent publishers.… (more)