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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