A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines combines fact and fiction to tell the parallel stories of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – two of the greatest mathematicians of the modern age. Gödel was plagued by mental illness and ended his days as a recluse, whilst Turing is most famous for breaking the Enigma code during the Second World War. Burdened by being homosexual at a time when it was criminalized, he too became increasingly isolated.

Few books defy being placed in a pigeon hole quite as much as this one. It would be easy to think of it as a lightly fictionalised pair of biographies, seamlessly interwoven, of two men in the same professional field who never physically met. The two lives appear to be complementary – each was a genius within his own sphere, but incapable of managing their own lives on a basic level.

Turing was naïve and trusting but Gödel, at the other end of the scale, suffered from paranoia. Both, too, had eating problems. Gödel was given an apple each day but refused to eat it because of its imperfections. Eventually he starved himself to death. Turing had the type of eating problems which I would associate with Asperger's Syndrome – with some foods causing agitation and all food needing sorting. He was obsessed with Snow White and the red apples. He bought one each day and eventually injected one with cyanide and ate it.

What sets this book apart is the manner in which it's written. Janna Levin's prose is like white water rafting: it's exhilarating, thought-provoking, startling and occasionally visceral. The imagery is extreme, but sometimes it simply doesn't work or goes too far and it's the equivalent of being dumped in the water. Strangely enough this never happens when Levin is writing about her home ground – the mathematics and the philosophy, where I'll freely admit that my understanding is not up to the subject matter – but rather in the more mundane matters. The descriptions of the Cafe Josephinum left me groaning and other parts were simply awkward, but then I wondered if this was an intentional reflection of the Turing and Gödel and I'd missed the point - or had Levin simply over-egged the pudding? There's nothing safe and tried about this book and Levin should be applauded for the fact that she's prepared to take risks with her writing.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.

For another fictionalised account of real lives you might like to read Arthur and George by Julian Barnes.

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