The Turing Test

Paul Leonard The Turing Test (2000)
If this Who novel following on from something first read back before I had pubes suggests an emerging theme, I should probably make it clear that it's really just comfort food for my eyes. My reading time is otherwise presently taken up with proofing print copies of my own five volume Mexico Diaries. I've spent the last five years editing the thing, and whilst I consider it at least sufficiently entertaining to have been worth the effort, it's pretty tough ploughing through all five of the cunts for the millionth time and still finding typos. Anyway, the point is that I needed light relief, hence The Turing Test.

The Turing Test was, as you probably know, part of a series of novels which kept Who going during the decade or so of it being off the air prior to its 2005 revival as a massive steaming pile of shite. This one followed on from the slightly underwhelming Paul McGann movie, and has been remembered as one of the better books, although not necessarily by me - which I'll come to in a moment.

To give credit where it's due, the BBC Who novels pulled some interesting moves in their time, facilitated by their collectively working as a larger ongoing narrative. At this point of his notional existence, the Doctor had been left stranded on Earth following not only the destruction of his home planet but also the retroactive erasure of his past; so he doesn't know who he is and the TARDIS may as well be just a wardrobe. He doesn't seem to age, and he doesn't know why, and he's living his life one year at a time with the vague understanding of something due to happen around the year 2000. I gather the point of this was to really get the writers earning their tuppence ha'penny, and to see if Doctor Who still worked with more or less all of the established props and references rendered off limits.

The Turing Test occurs during the second world war and draws in Alan Turing, Graham Greene, and Joseph Heller as both characters and authors; furthermore, the novel is divided into three parts, each one a first person narrative written in an approximation of their respective styles. The story, just to get it out of the way, concerns an impenetrable code which, so it transpires, derives from alien visitors rather than Nazis, hence Turing. Graham Greene additionally worked for MI6, aside from being a novelist, so that's how he figures, and Joseph Heller knew how to fly a plane, and at one point they need to fly a plane…

In its favour, The Turing Test is a novel which is quite happy to be a novel, with none of the usual passages half-wishing they were on telly. It's been a while since I read either The Power and the Glory or Catch-22, but Paul Leonard seems to do a decent job of capturing the voices of their authors, so far as I'm able to tell. Additionally in its favour, The Turing Test tries to say something beyond simply plugging up a few hours of your time with adventures. Specifically, it presents comparisons by which we might consider the question of what is human - hence the title - with variant flavours represented by the Doctor, the aliens, Greene's somewhat dour pessimism, Heller's humanism, Turing's vulnerability, various Nazis just doing their jobs, and so on and so forth.

It's ambitious and generally exceptionally well written, and it almost works but sort of doesn't, or didn't for me. I felt the same way the first time I read it however many years ago. The problem is that, I would guess, Leonard put so much work into impersonating Turing, Greene, and Heller that he lost his grip on the dynamic of the story, which just seems to drift along for a few hundred pages without any clear objective in sight, pissing away the goodwill of the reader - me in this case - until we come to the final third and suddenly notice that here is a writer who has taken the author of Catch-22 and made him have an exciting adventure with Doctor Who from the telly, which is just silly. The Turing Test has its feet in two camps and is neither one thing nor the other - too ponderous to be gripping, too juvenile to provoke much thought. Its not a bad book by any means, but I really feel it should have been better.

Palm Sunday

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Palm Sunday (1981)
Most of Vonnegut's novels constitute autobiography of one form or another. Palm Sunday goes a little further, being an assemblage of essays, reviews, newspaper articles, speeches, unpublished introductions to other people's books, and notes reminding the milkman that no further yoghurt will be required until the weekend; so it's the same sort of deal as Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, except ordered as a chronology with added material framing most of the reprints in the wider context of Vonnegut's existence.

There are several problems with this as a collection. Firstly the fifty pages of Vonnegut dynastic history covering four generations - or what felt like four generations - written by a distant relative is almost certainly more fun to read if you're actually a Vonnegut. Secondly, despite much of Vonnegut's oeuvre being approximately autobiographical, it's rare that he talks about his career as a writer - excepting parodies by way of Kilgour Trout - and I guess that was a good thing. Here he talks about the art of writing, about the business aspect, and about hanging out with other writers. Some of it's sort of interesting - notably what an arsehole Jack Kerouac obviously was - but somehow this daylight cast upon magic seems counterproductive, suggesting a Vonnegut with more than a touch of the Richard Stilgoe or Ronnie Corbett about him. There's a whole blogging genre out there born from young, slightly clueless university educated men who've decided to pursue careers as authors of Doctor Who novels, having somehow failed to make the distinction between the world of Camus and Genet and exciting telly adventures featuring outer space robot people; and whilst these young lads may well be as harmless and amiable as their work, their online musings are purest grade one ballsache.

Where I get my amazing ideas...

Analysing the genius of Stephen Moffat…

A day in the life of an unpublished author...

Wish me luck! I'm thinking of pitching a story pitting the first Doctor against the Sontarans…

Oh look, yet another charity anthology…

I suppose it's my own fault that I'm even aware of such twattery; but to return to the point, Vonnegut's reportage of certain aspects of his writing career unfortunately convey a similarly sense of indulgence, as though he's just got settled in his favourite armchair, pipe at the ready, and a wry wink as we embark on the first anecdote of many. You don't have to be crazy to write these books, but it helps!

On the other hand, even at his cosiest, Vonnegut mostly remains at least self aware and disinclined to brag.

I would add that novelists are not only unusually depressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

There's just about sufficient quality material laced through the collection to justify ploughing on through the cosier sections, observations regarding Dresden, Joseph Heller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline being of particular note.

Now is as good a time as any to mention White House prayer breakfasts, I guess. I think we all know now that religion of that sort is about as nourishing to the human spirit as potassium cyanide. We have been experimenting with it. Every guinea pig died. We are up to our necks in dead guinea pigs.

Palm Sunday is unmistakeably the work of the guy who wrote Slaughterhouse Five and the rest, with that same scathing wit and ability to cut to the chase; but it's nowhere near so good as the novels, and there's a seam of schmaltz running through it which jars almost as much as its peculiarly Stilgoe-esque cover.

Catch-22

Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about failing to connect with yet another supposed classic of twentieth century literature given that a significant quota of the reviews I've found posted online seem to express a general sense of bewilderment, and actually I liked it more than most of the people who actively hated it, so I suppose there's that.

It's beautifully written, but extraordinarily repetitive. There's a point to the repetition but acknowledgement of the fact doesn't really help. Unless you've been living in the proverbial cave since 1961, you will almost certainly be aware that Catch-22 is about absurdity and contradiction, or rather it dissects the second world war in terms of these qualities. The catch of the title is the idea that Yossarian - around whom the novel revolves - aspires to get out of flying yet another bombing mission on grounds of insanity, an aspiration which unfortunately proves him to be entirely sane; and almost every page is crammed with actions rendered meaningless by this sort of circular logic, and there are nearly five-hundred pages. Harold Pinter employed similar devices, but usually required only an hour or so of our time to make his point. Kafka also managed it with greater brevity. My guess would be that Heller was simply hammering the point home, striving for a sort of scale vaguely analogous to a Rothko painting wherein no part of the canvas draws greater focus than any other; or if you prefer, the book is kind of boring, but maybe it's supposed to be boring, like Tony Conrad drawing a single note from his violin over the course of an hour because, as Eno puts it, repetition is a form of change. Maybe I'm getting carried away with the analogies, but I'm guessing the point is boredom plus absurdity times scale in contrast to the horror of the details, the bombing, the severed limbs flying all around, even the rape, all reduced to the absurdist wallpaper of conversations about shoes; for, as Kurt Vonnegut also discovered, war eludes description because the actual experience cannot be replicated, so it's easier to describe its psychological habitat.

Unfortunately though, the uniformity of absurdist surface texture serving to level everything out to actions of equivalent consequence makes it difficult for the reader, or this reader, to really care about any of it, or about who is even who. Such is the quality of writing, not least the jokes, that it's easy enough to keep on going, and is even a pleasure for the most part, so while I didn't feel inclined to pack it in at any point, I frequently found myself thinking that Spike Milligan's war diaries did pretty much the same thing but were funnier and more engaging, and so made the same points better.

I don't know if Catch-22 is quite a classic, although I guess it must be simply because we've all already agreed that it is - which is possibly ironic given that this is more or less what the book is about, namely a world which behaves in such a way entirely because we've agreed that it is so. I'd dispute its being anything like the roller-coaster described by the cover blurb of this edition. My best guess is that its popularity is in part mainly just numbers, and that it first saw print just as a great many Americans really began to ask themselves what the fuck just happened?; and in that context it's probably a better response than the gung-ho or else purely statistical alternatives.

On the other hand, Slaughterhouse Five is half the length, considerably more confusing, and yet clearly a fucking masterpiece, so maybe the previous three paragraphs really aren't much more than word salad and excuses.