Wellcome Book Prize Winner
Republic of Consciousness Prize Winner
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Goldsmiths Prize Shortlist
James Tait Black Prize Shortlist
BBC National Short Story Award Shortlist (for the novel’s opening chapter)
Rathbones Folio Prize Longlist
Big Other Readers’ Choice Award Honorable Mention
Wall Street Journal “Distinctive Novel of the Year” selection
Advocate “Best of the Year” selection
New Scientist “Best Book of the Year” selection
Guardian “Best Book of the Year” selection
Kirkus Reviews “Best Book of the Year” selection
Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” selection
Australian Book Review “Book of the Year” selection
“[Murmur will] grip your mind in the very first pages, break your heart halfway through, and in the end, strangely, unexpectedly, restore your faith in human beings and their endless capacity for resilience.” —Wellcome Book Prize chair of judges Elif Shafak in the Guardian
“Eaves’ playful, fiercely intelligent interpretation of aspects of the life of a character who closely resembles the brilliant, multifaceted Alan Turing is a dreamlike wonder of memory and consciousness. Its ways are mysterious, its effect deepens with every reading.” —Republic of Consciousness Prize judge Catherine Taylor in the Guardian
“Murmur is a fully achieved literary experiment, digging deep into all the dimensions of human consciousness.” —Goldsmiths Prize judge’s citation
“Murmur is a restrained and elegant exploration of cause and effect, and the meaning of life and love.” —BBC judges’ citation
“Beautiful and hallucinatory. . . . From extreme isolation and suffering springs a vision of universal connectedness.” —Wall Street Journal
“Gripping. . . . A wildly inventive and moving exploration of the human mind.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Exquisite. . . . This novel will submerge readers in contemplation and dazzling prose as it captures the essence of mind and matter.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Complex and erudite. . . . [Murmur] bears reading twice.” —Library Journal
“A deftly crafted read from beginning to end. . . . Extraordinary and unreservedly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review
“Scrupulous, humane . . . [Murmur] is as bracingly intelligent as it is brave. . . . [Eaves] knows that Turing’s theories of consciousness have implications for fiction, and that fiction can operate at the frontiers of what we know about the workings of our minds.” —Guardian
“An extraordinary exploration of dreams, consciousness, science and the future.” —New Scientist
“Captures beautifully the pith and precision of Turing’s own prose. . . . One of Eaves’s great accomplishments is to make the aesthetic questions raised by [Murmur] as significant as the ethical ones.” —Financial Times
“Exceptionally poised and elegant. . . . Murmur is a poignant meditation on the irrepressible complexity of human nature and sexuality, and a powerful indictment of the cowardice and groupthink that sustain state-sanctioned barbarism. It also poses timely questions about the digital world Turing’s pioneering work helped bring about.” —Irish Times
“Eaves has achieved one of the pinnacles of novelistic endeavour: he has given deep thought to human experience, and in doing so brought to life the ‘self-conscious wonder’ of thought itself.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Murmur is boldly different from anything else written about Turing.” —Times
“There is science, there is art and there is Jungian symbolism. . . . For all its challenges, Murmur is also beautiful [in its] willingness to embrace opacity, its portrayal of the labyrinthine paths along which thought proceeds, and its exhilarating ambition to test Alec’s belief that ‘[a] mind can’t prove or step outside itself’ by inviting us to step out from ours, and into his.” —New Statesman
“No one can be sure of what went through Turing’s mind in the final months before his suicide, but Murmur—a weaving, witty text packed with insight about the future—feels entirely believable.” —E&T Magazine
“[Murmur] has achieved the holy grail of modern prose: conveying consciousness. . . . An exquisitely crafted novel.” —Review 31
“Ambitiously and brilliantly illustrates the relationships between fiction, consciousness, and artificial intelligence.” —Australian Book Review
“Presented through journal entries, letters and a feverish dream chronicle, Murmur offers a poetically charged reading experience that is at once scientifically astute, philosophically engaging, and emotionally disturbing. . . . A bold, imaginative accomplishment.” —Rough Ghosts
“It takes a certain literary brilliance to convey the conscious and unconscious mind of one of history’s greatest intellects. Will Eaves eloquently probes the boundaries between dreams, perception, and reality, prompting the reader to examine the recesses of their own labyrinthine psyche. A seamless dialogue between art and science, and fact and fiction.” —Heather Berlin, Ph.D., M.P.H., neuroscientist and host of Science Goes to the Movies and Startalk All-Stars
“Murmur is a profound meditation on what machine consciousness might mean, the implications of AI, where it will all lead. It’s one of the big stories of our time, though no one else has treated it with such depth and originality.” —Peter Blegvad, author of The Book of Leviathan
“Tender and funny, Murmur takes the tragic story of Turing’s life and punishment and ingeniously transforms it into something glittering, subversive, and even triumphant. Eaves has built a magnificently challenging memorial to one of the great twentieth-century martyrs.” —Patrick Gale, author of Rough Music and A Place Called Winter
“Will Eaves’s [Murmur] is masterful—compassionate, principled, and moving. It is deeply wise, with the aching loneliness of both human indignity and dignity, despair and courage.” —Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces and All We Saw
“Murmur by Will Eaves is a really extraordinary book, unlike any other. He’s in a class of his own.” —Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
★ 2019-02-18
A challenging literary experiment about the shifting nature of human consciousness, inspired by English computer scientist Alan Turing, who was persecuted for being gay.
British novelist and poet Eaves (The Absent Therapist, 2014, etc.) tells the story of Alec Pryor, an English mathematician modeled after Turing, in three sections. Part of a top-secret effort to decrypt coded German communications during World War II, Pryor is a prominent member of scientific and government circles after the war. He is also, however, a gay man at a time when homosexuality is a punishable offense under British law. Searching for intimacy under these conditions, he wanders a fairground and meets a man named Cyril, with whom he strikes up a sexual relationship. This is his downfall: A friend of Cyril's breaks into Pryor's apartment, and when he reports the crime, he's taken in for suspicion of homosexual acts. Soon, he finds himself under the control of Dr. Stallbrook, an analyst who oversees the chemical castration to which he's been sentenced. Stallbrook encourages Pryor to write, and these "notes to pass the time" become the hallucinatory dreamscapes of the book's second and third parts. As the synthetic estrogen does its work, Pryor's consciousness ranges back and forth in time, from Britain's hunter-gatherer past to a future in which machines replace human consciousness. Watching himself as if from afar, he comes to terms with the loss of control he suffers as his body changes. All the while, he is haunted by the memory of a figure from his schoolboy days, Christopher Molyneaux, a fellow student Pryor loved but whose friendship gradually faded. "I think he was told no good could come of our friendship, because of what I am, or rather, because of what, then, it was suggested I would become." In careful prose, Eaves prods at the limits of human consciousness as Pryor comes to grips with the changes wracking his body. All the while Eaves asks important questions about our ability to communicate our innermost thoughts to those we love. "What would a conversation be with instant, mutual apprehension of its themes?" Pryor wonders. Eaves has delivered a gripping narrative experiment that gives us a sense of what such an intimacy would be like.
A wildly inventive and moving exploration of the human mind under conditions of duress.
