#39
The Turing Test
By Paul Leonard
Paul Leonard is one of those Doctor Who writers that sticks to his themes. Like Malcolm Hulke before him, he is interested in the differences and similarities between people – human or otherwise.
The Turing Test is a particularly subtle entry in Leonard’s “aliens are weird, but also not” canon. This time there are no outlandish life cycles or outrageous rituals to contend with; the whole point, as suggested by the title, is that they are similar enough to us that they bear further examination. There are little nuggets of alien-ness of course, such as a language that begins as singing, then awkwardly acclimatises itself to human speech. But they’re not so great that the three narrators of this book, themselves very different men with conflicting viewpoints (about the aliens, among other things), ever make up their minds to mistrust or fear these beings outright.
And on that: it’s another in a pleasingly growing line of BBC Books that plays with the format. Yes, we’re already in an odd version of Doctor Who that eschews TARDIS travel and features a Doctor with no idea who he is or what he does for a living. But The Turing Test also bumps the Doctor out of focus, letting three (coincidentally quite famous) men carry the story instead as a relay race. Shades of Eye Of Heaven, Heart Of TARDIS and Festival Of Death there, but Leonard’s book feels like its own take on a multi-narrator jumbled narrative. It occasionally steps back over itself to offer context (like Festival) but that isn’t the whole selling point here. Instead these narrators are trying to figure out who the hell the Doctor is and what he’s doing despite none of them having the complete puzzle.
It’s unusual on a story level too. The basic thrust of most Doctor Who episodes/books/whatever is that aliens, or otherwise bad guys want to carry out an evil plan. That’s not the case here: we just have one group of aliens trying to escape the world circa 1944, and another group of aliens trying to prevent them from doing so. Yes, we can place our bets as to which group of aliens is the “nice” one, but it’s never made explicitly clear – indeed, according to Narrator #3: “I saw that [the Doctor] had no more idea which side had been right than I had.” On one side you have a pompous and sinister general, but also a friendly woman that one of our narrators falls in love with. Both demonstrate constant, subtly inhuman behaviours. On the other side you have a group of strangers we barely interact with at all, but the Doctor seems taken with them, and isn’t that usually enough? It’s murky and anticlimactic to the extent that when some of them do escape in the end the Doctor and co. don’t even see it happen. (It’s even suggested that if you did see it, there’d be no great special effect.)
This is all set against the dying days of the Second World War, where jingoism has ceased to keep people motivated and some (like Joseph Heller) were going out of their minds questioning it all. There are occasional harmless Germans in the story, and few Nazis. Dresden features prominently – a classic example of atrocity not being the exclusive purview of the “bad guys”. Right and wrong are baked into The Turing Test, with Alan Turing and Graham Greene in particular debating the proper emotional reaction to the Holocaust, or to the deaths of regretful Nazi collaborators. Each considers the other to be heartless in his way, and both have a flawed, biased perspective. It’s another form of dehumanisation and wondering if other people have the same right to exist that was already powering The Turing Test via the alien plot.
A frustrated inability to communicate is at the heart of all this, summed up nicely with a line that could apply to all of Paul Leonard books: “‘I didn’t realise how different you could be.’ ‘Well, now you know.’” Alan Turing and the ENIGMA machine make for another smart backdrop to Leonard’s theme – understanding from chaos – which we then extrapolate to the uncertain human-or-not beings on both sides of the conflict, and of course to the Doctor himself, who is about as frustrated as he’s ever been.
We’re three books into the “Earth arc” which was, by all accounts, an attempt to reset the Eighth Doctor’s characterisation and make it easier for authors to grasp. (Personally I thought they were doing a pretty good job already, and their main problem seemed to be just not talking to each other enough, but hey ho.) The Doctor understandably wasn’t himself in The Burning and Casualties Of War, allowing for or inciting acts of violence and generally lacking empathy, or lacking it in his usual quantities. But you’d be hard pressed to point at the character in those books and say that was someone you didn’t recognise.
The Turing Test suggests that he is, if anything, getting worse over time. The TARDIS has evolved to the point where it’s a big blue box you can open with a key, but there’s nothing in it, which causes him to sob and wail. When he finally encounters aliens he has no way to understand them. (Hence Turing.) The very concept of finding alien life, and of sticking his oar in to rescue them or stop them (delete where appropriate) fills him with such wild excitement that he can’t seem to stop getting people endangered or killed for it. His plans aren’t good, and as I’ve mentioned they’re questionably partisan. He’s hardly putting a stop to Davros here: when he arranges for a colleague to bug someone, which inadvertently (??) kills them, there’s little evidence that he’s advanced the cause of good in the universe. And when he arranges/commits another murder at the end (it’s not clear who did it but several people blame themselves) it seems to have been purely in the name of getting off of Earth once and for all, which is the most barefaced selfish he’s been in recent (ahem) memory. We can assume he’s somewhat ashamed of this, as he immediately resets to helping the nearby wounded instead, but you’re still offered a long glimpse of the Doctor at his worst.
It’s debatable whether this stretches to his treatment of Turing, who he may or may not have strung along romantically. Memory or no, we can be sure he’s not dangling any real prospect over Turing, but then he’s also been acclimatised to Earth long enough to have tried signing up with the RAF to help the war effort, and he’s been close enough to people like Mary Minett (who also couldn’t contain herself around him), so this latest infatuation is unlikely to have escaped his notice or earshot entirely. At the end Leonard repeats the fact that no one knows why Turing committed suicide, which in this tie-in genre novel context allows for a certain crass inference. I wonder if it’s really the Doctor or Leonard who’s demonstrating questionable behaviour there.
If I have an issue with The Turing Test it’s Turing. Not so much the writing of him, which is as satisfyingly identifiable as the other two narrators. Turing is curious and analytical; his perspective is unusual, given his ability to sympathise based on logic rather than emotion, but all of that is still recognisably baked in emotion. Greene is emotive and dismissive; he constantly picks up on the tell-tale “bad movie dialogue” of the aliens, and the things happening around him that feel like developments in a dubious novel. (Protesting a little too much if I’m honest there, Paul.) Heller is sardonic and perhaps the most human of the three; it’s him who has to relate the explanations and consequences of all this, so it’s through him that the novel ultimately fails to reach any comfortable conclusions. All three narrators have a distinct and readable style, with Heller’s in particular racing along in an entertaining fashion. (I haven’t read Catch-22 but I’m guessing this bit rings true. Lines like: “Despite his evident willingness to kill me, he seemed a decent, honourable man. ‘Look here,’ said the Doctor. ‘I can see that you’re a decent, honourable man, Major.’” And: “‘You can’t,’ echoed the bewildered major, now very bewildered.” And especially: “Now the mad colonel had me over a barrel. It was a small uncomfortable barrel, rotting in places. It didn’t have any beer in it, and it was adrift, barely afloat, in the middle of the Mediterranean, or perhaps the Atlantic.”)
It comes down to a question of taste – admittedly mine as well as the book’s. Greene and Heller are both dismissive of Turing as a fawning, childlike buffoon. You can comfortably call this the whim of flawed narrators – the characters aren’t Paul Leonard, for heaven’s sake, they can say and think things the author does not endorse. And while Greene says just-plain-mean things like Turing having “the mind of a child — a weak child, timid and unyielding — and like a child he was given to tantrums when he didn’t get his own way”, and downright prejudiced things like “His unnatural sexual orientation, and his imposition of that attitude on the asexual being of the Doctor, were typical of his attitude to life. He may not have been very much more sinful than any of us, but he had no guilt for his sins, and that made him less than a whole man”, to say nothing of outright crass asides such as “His face was illuminated with that selfish flush, that suffusion of blood that you see in children when the lollipop of their choice has been provided. I wondered what lollipops the Doctor was providing for Turing”, the Doctor does at least take him to task for it, albeit slightly: “The fact that he’s homosexual should have nothing to do with it. You have some extraordinary prejudices.”
But then we compound it with Heller too, as he also has shade to throw at him. See: “Alan Turing was a dull, opportunistic man, intelligent and obtuse, observant and self-centred, kind-hearted and wilfully cold. A fleshy man, he nonetheless minced around, filled with uncertainty about his every gesture, yet he was always certain that his overall outlook on life was right.” And: “Turing thinks [life with the Doctor]’s good, because he’s a boring, unadventurous, stuck-up English prig.” (To be fair he also adds that “Greene thinks it’s bad, because he’s prone to swift, emotional judgements, and therefore judges most things to be bad.” So yeah, ’ave it, Graham.) To spend one third of your book lobbing zingers at a real, unhappy, ultimately suicidal man might be considered literary colour. To spend two thirds, well, it comes across as a bit mean-spirited and leaves behind an unpleasant taste. How could it not?
It’s quite possible I’m overreacting. Again, characters aren’t their authors. This is all made up and it’s not as if there’s a rule somewhere that says you specifically can’t be rude about Turing. But in a novel that’s already using the Dresden bombing as a sci-fi sandbox, and has the unspoken-but-kinda-spoken idea that an unrequited love for the Doctor might have doomed Alan Turing, I wonder if frequently jabbing at him as well, without any significant rebuttal or recourse to understand him better as a result of it – which as we’ve established is Paul Leonard’s whole bag – really serves a point other than to illustrate how some people probably reacted to the guy. Which we could already infer was “not with enormous sensitivity” given, you know, his life.
Anyway! Ahem. The Turing Test, then. Apart from certain distractions it’s a thoughtful book, and an unusual piece of ongoing Doctor Who. I don’t know what to make of the Doctor at this stage, and for once that’s not because I don’t recognise what the author is doing – it’s because we’re in somewhat uncharted territory. That’s exciting. The use of an uncertain menace, or perhaps no real menace at all, is something other authors could take note of. It doesn’t always have to be killer blobs or evil conspiracies, y’know. (Not that it always is, but anything we can do to get away from old tropes is a plus.) That’s three novels in a row where the Doctor is capable of not being the lily-white good guy, and although that’s not something I want to see become standard operating procedure, the journey back to a more comfortable place could be ripe for storytelling. There’s even, yes, plenty to be said for novels that are unafraid to make the reader uncomfortable. Without going off on one again about how he handled it and whether it had a point, I don’t hate that Leonard wrote very some human unpleasantness into this. But that aspect does keep me from championing The Turing Test outright.
7/10
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