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Fall of Man in Wilmslow by David Lagercrantz: book review





Fall of Man in Wilmslow – The Life and Death of Alan Turing: A Novel (2009, English edition 2015) is about British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954). He was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 film The Imitation Game about his work as a codebreaker with the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park.

The book is a re-imagining of Turing’s life and death from the point of view of a 28-year-old Detective Constable Leonard Corell, who investigates Turing’s death. Turing is found dead from a poisoned apple laced with deadly cyanide in an elaborate suicide at the age of 41, after being brought to trial for gross indecency in 1952. He received a posthumous government pardon in 2009.

But what if it wasn’t suicide. Turing’s work was top secret – so top secret that his family and close friends did not know what he was doing for the British government. Whatever it was, it must have been important because he was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1945 for his work in computer science, codebreaking, and logic that aided Britain during World War II. Was his death accidental, or was he murdered? Corell unearths the facts and the ‘maybes’ until he is out of his depth and into danger.

Lagercrantz writes in-depth about the detective’s life and background, as well as Alan Turing’s. In attempting to understand Turing’s death, Corell wants to understand his life – and that includes his theories and writings on the liar’s paradox, mathematical logic and the theory of computation. Was Turing’s ‘madness’ about a machine that could one day think like a human brain be really feasible? Was the apple symbolic? Was he indeed mad or was he a genius? What really was in the mind of this loner, this strange human being?

It is not the ‘thriller’ or ‘espionage’ novel as is often described. Rather, it is a slowly-revealing historical fictional account of Corell’s obsession to get to the truth and to ‘de-cipher’ Turing, just as Turing de-ciphered code. I studied and wrote about Turing during my mathematics degree, and found that the theories presented in this novel are reasonably well explained in simple terms for the reader. While slow in parts, and while some dates contradict history, it’s an interesting read – especially if readers have also seen the movie.







MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).



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