The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
 by David Leavitt
Weidenfeld & Nicolson pp320

For those who know even a slither of Turing will tell you of his almost childishness typical of geeky genius, who adored Disney's films, and often recited the spell that the Wicked Queen chants over the poisoned apple she offers to the simpering heroine. Why is this important?

In 1954, Turning took his own life – for he was in despair after his arrest for 'gross indecency' with a rent boy, for which his punishment had been chemical castration.

A bitten apple was found beside his bed; before chomping, he had dipped it in a cyanide solution. Novelist David Leavitt, a specialist in the existential intricacy of gay relationships, concludes this short biography by remarking that no prince ever came to kiss Turing awake.

Before looking at Leavitt’s novel, I should say I first read his "The Body of Jonah Boyd." It is a novel within a novel, ending with a self-referential twist that made me wonder whether Leavitt had been inspired by Turing's mind boggling proof about undecidability in which a computer tries to swallow its own tail – bootstrapping.

So armed with this I went on to read “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. Leavitt, the American gay novelist, has no mathematical background, though he makes considerable efforts to cover Turing's work. He doesn’t use recently released “code breaking” documents and his treatment of Turing's Enigma work is particularly thin. His focus, however, lies in applying his interpretation of sexual politics to Turing's texts against the background of the times – valuable nevertheless.

I must say though the circumstances surrounding Turing's demise are murky enough that some people doubt he really killed himself. He had been using potassium cyanide in gold-plating experiments. The poisoning was conceivably accidental. Leavitt entertains, though not so seriously, another possibility: "that the suicide was staged," and he had become, like the Hitchcock character, "a man who knew too much."

Leavitt discusses Turing's writing on artificial intelligence; his main point being that Turing asserts the equality of machines and minds as a sort of code for the demand for homosexual equality. But Turing’s wit is secondary to his scientific thesis about the computer and the brain, which comes from putting his theory of computability into the traditional problem of mind and matter: this is the argument that makes Turing's work so relevant today.

In his book Leavitt includes Turing's self-motivated pre-war work on ciphers, but doesn’t suggest that Turing took on the vital naval Enigma problem off his own bat, when prevailing wisdom considered it unsolvable. Leavitt depicts Turing's work as theoretical rather than hugely practical.

This is a fascinating story of a fascinating man told in a way that is entertaining and beautiful.