Murmur (2018)

By Will Eaves

173pp, Fiction

Notes

2019-03-30

Just finished Murmur by Will Eaves – The opening section of which was shortlisted fro the BBC’s short story award back in 2017. It’s a fictionalised account of Alan Turing’s experience of ‘chemical castration’ with the emphasis heavily on the first person experience – hallucinatory dreams etc. a fascinating experiment which Eaves very nearly pulls off. For me though the poetry of the language and the insights that are thrown up wrt conciousness, selfhood and memory aren’t equaled by control of the novel as a form. The opening section is the strongest whilst I felt that a fairly aggressive cutting in the mid-section might have helped everything to cohere. TBH reading it in the wake of the Milkman, another novel which hews tightly to a first person experiential perspective, probably didn’t do it many favours. Milkman is staggeringly good, Murmur is fascinating but flawed by comparison.