Fall of Man in Wilmslow

David Lagercrantz, translated by George Goulding

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, June 16th 2015

In the lead up to the 70^th anniversary of the end of WWII there has been a revival of interest in events and people that paved the way for Allied victory, particularly the men and women at Bletchley Park, whose breaking of the German’s Enigma Code arguably turned the tide of the war. Chief among them is the tragic figure of Alan Turing, whose posthumous recognition as a national hero is a direct contrast to the vilification to which he was subjected during the last years of his life.  

In Fall of Man in Wilmslow, Swedish author David Lagercrantz uses a fictional framework to paint a portrait of not only the man and his work, but also the prevailing socio-political forces that saw Turing persecuted, cut off from the research that had formed the centre of his life, and eventually driven to suicide.

The novel opens in June 8^th, 1954 with the arrival of Detective Inspector Leonard Corell at the house where Turing has been found dead in his bed, a cyanide-laced apple on the table next to him. Although promptly certified as a suicide, Corell finds himself fascinated by the man, not least because the case revives the detective’s own dreams of studying mathematics were dashed by circumstances beyond his control.

Convinced that there is something more to the matter than meets the eye and takes it upon himself to seek out the truth, and in so doing he brings himself to the attention of same Home Office officials whose paranoid persecution of homosexuals as both moral defectives and potential of Soviet spies probably contributed to Turning’s death.  The novel shifts perspective between Corell and a variety of other narrators, including Oscar Farley, Turing’s friend and immediate superior at Bletchley Park, and their stories intertwine with the mathematician’s own, culminating in an epilogue that takes us 30 years into Corell’s future and a victory of sorts for both men.

In trying to balance the factual and fictional components of the story, Lagercrantz has set himself a difficult assignment, with mixed results. 

Although the police-procedural format works well to the physical aspects of Turing’s life, a proper appreciation of his contributions to mathematics and computing requires a degree of knowledge of certain key theories that cannot be taken for granted, and herein lies the novel’s major flaw; these are introduced as miniature lectures from Turing’s colleagues and excerpts from the mathematical texts in which Corell immerses himself, and it is as if the author has stepped into to say “I’ll get back to the story in a minute but there are a few things you need to know first”  – a perception that is heightened comparison to the novel I am currently reading, Zia Haider Rahman’s novel In the Light of What we Know, which introduces similar concepts without breaking the fourth wall.

 It is in the unconstrained passages when Lagercrantz  (who has just completed a continuation to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series) immerses us in the character’s interior lives and memories that the story really flows. These are the moments that linger in the mind.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/fictional-account-alan-turing-thought-provoking