Turing’s triumph and terror in graphic detail
French author tells remarkable tale in a compelling way, writes Tom Sandborn.
Alan Turing was an important pioneer in the creation of our modern world of computers. He was one of the heroic scientists in Britain who found a way to decrypt coded Nazi military communication during the Second World War, and thus contributed significantly to the Allied victory.
After the war, he continued to do groundbreaking work in computational number theory, cellular differentiation and speech encoding. Despite these many contributions to his country and to pure science, Turing did not end his life full of years and honours, as he richly deserved.
Instead, in a Britain still dominated by homophobic laws that criminalized his gay desire, Turing was arrested for “grave indecency,” condemned to chemical castration and denied access to government work and research funding. He died in 1954 in what has been widely believed to have been a suicide, although some recent scholarship has challenged this version.
In The Case of Alan Turing, French author Arnaud Delalande and illustrator Eric Liberge have created a dark, moody graphic novel that tells this story in a stylish, intelligent fashion. Ably translated by David Homel, this book is both a true work of art with a compelling visual style and a remarkable story well suited to the graphic novel format.
This format allows the author and illustrator to evoke dreams and night terrors, as well as the triumphant and transformative nature of desire and the crippling power of the self-loathing homophobia imposed on so many gay people of Turing’s generation.
The use of light and shadow in these passages will remind some readers of the masterpieces of Caravaggio, while the presentation of Turing as towering intellect harrowed by guilt and despair gestures toward some of the best examples of the American comic book, particularly the self-doubting, dark superheroes of the Marvel comics. Think of this character, and this book, as an implausible but nonetheless successful blend of Batman and Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov.
Turing’s was a towering intellect and a complex personality, and his treatment by the British state was an outrageous example of government ingratitude. This novel reminds us of his story, and retells it in all its operatic splendour in a new format. The Turing story served as the basis for the award-winning 2014 movie The Imitation Game, but this book shows the tale still has legs.
It occurs to me that it would make a terrific inspiration for an opera, either focusing entirely on Turing’s life or, even better, linking his story with that of Sir Roger Casement, the human rights campaigner and Irish rebel who went to a British gallows because of his attempts to fortify an Irish revolution with money and arms from Germany during the First World War. As a knight of the realm, Casement had every reason to expect the House of Lords would commute his death sentence, but the public circulation of his sex diaries, which recorded his impressive dedication to sleeping with young men in the Third World, prevented the Lords from extending that peer courtesy.
There is an opera in these two thematically linked stories, and I hope someone is busy on the libretto while we all enjoy Delalande and Liberge’s version of the tale.