Jacques Marchand, The Quiet Joy of Alan Turing, Québec Amérique, August 27, 2026, 536 pages, €24.
One mid-May afternoon in 1926, aboard the ferry deck arriving from Saint-Malo, a thirteen-year-old boy on the Southampton quay breathes in the scent of freshly baked bread that intoxicates him. The author of an essay on Claude Gauvreau and of two novels published in France, and translator of Michael Harris, Jacques Marchand opens with that moment the novel he published in Montreal in 2019 with Québec Amérique. Alan Turing’s life, traced through the years up to the Manchester era, is measured by restrained joys that this man often acknowledged only in retrospect.
The Grantchester Meadow
Dropped into the middle of a general strike, the boy regards the country’s paralysis as a favorable omen, for the stoppage of trains grants him sixty miles by bicycle to reach Sherborne College, three hazelnuts in his pocket for luck. The narrative immediately seizes Alan by the body, his new shoes bought too large by frugal parents, the blisters forming at his heels, the hunger gnawing at him, the hairs on the nape of his neck standing at attention from exhilaration. This attention persists to the last page, because with this Alan thought travels through the muscles before reaching the equations.
In June 1935, the day after his twenty-third birthday, Alan races too fast along the Grantchester path, slows, vaults a low fence and lies down beneath a stray ash tree among the poplars. Lying in the warm grass, the image that was missing from his universal calculating machine comes to him of its own accord—a ribbon of infinite paper—and he suppresses a laugh, studies his fingers, arms raised toward the foliage, until a grass-snake winds its way up to his elbow. It is in this exhausted body, emptied of its calculative burden by effort, that Jacques Marchand places with precision the seed of the idea from which computers will grow. Alan knows from experience that the most rigorous reasoning awaits the intuitive spark that appears without warning. Christopher Morcom, the Sherborne comrade whose blue-tinted solutions he pursued in chemistry, and whose memory accompanies Alan everywhere, joins him in thought for the simple happiness of being present.
The body that thinks is also the one that British justice confiscates in 1952, when Alan, convicted of homosexuality under an 1885 law, is subjected to hormonal treatment. The novel traces this dispossession down to the humblest act, a housekeeper teaching him to sew a button back on, a needlework task in which he thinks he is mending himself, until a line from a William Blake poem, read in a neighbor’s book, accompanies him for weeks, “Joy and woe are woven fine”.
The Virtues of Getting Lost
In a Bletchley Park hut, in March 1940, the Bombe assembled with engineer Harold Keen clicks for a long moment and then stops abruptly, just before the Polish-supplied Enigma replica reveals a German message in the clear. A colleague suggests heading to the pub for a drink; Alan hears himself say it would be wiser to try another test immediately, and then the elder Knox, eyes misted, prepares a solemn speech which Alan deflects. The title finds its meaning here, because this man discovers his emotions with hours of delay, and it will take a question from Joan Clarke, a few months later, for him to realize while pedaling that he feels better than ever and begins, if not happiness, at least to take his life in hand. Well after the war, he will confide only to a former girl from the hut that those years were beautiful. Eight years after the Bomb, in Manchester, before the twinkling points of light on the Baby’s cathode-ray tubes, he contemplates, seeking the wish to cry victory in vain, and is content to see a machine tremble like a wobbly calf that cannot yet stand.
The 20th of February 1947, at Burlington House, Alan announces before the London Mathematical Society that a computer will eventually demonstrate intelligence, eliciting muffled laughter from an awkward audience. The narrative then returns him to Cambridge, determined to embed a generator of random numbers into the universal machine—a touch of chance that will lead it to make chess mistakes that it will learn from, as living beings do. He thinks this way because at Bletchley he woke at night with the solution he’d found in his sleep, so reverie becomes, in this book, the cornerstone of human intelligence and that of machines. These Cambridge pages accurately transpose a remark once spoken by the historical Turing on that February day, “if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent”.
Honey Toasts
A second voice threads through the book, that of a Montréal-born narrator who presents in essay form the logic of Hilbert or the Turing test, and also conducts the investigation. After the King’s College Turing fonds, he travels to Stoneleigh, south of London, to Florence N., ninety-five, a former resident of block 8, who is watched over by a granddaughter dressed as a boy and a portly Jack Russell. She receives him because he comes from elsewhere, a stranger to England as much as to mathematics. He is also heard, as a young woman, speaking on the telephone with Alan, linking the two times of the narrative. For her visitor, she recalls the honey-toasted bread Alan prepared for her at Cambridge or the miniature chessboard he kept for her alone on the mantel. Doctoral students who preceded him spoke of a barely recognizable Alan to their eyes, while biographers, she says, forget even the blue in his gaze. When the narrator lingers on Snow White, Alan’s favorite film, she thinks he is wasting his time and reminds him that Alan cherished fairy tales, some of which were as perfect as a beautiful theorem.
Manchester has cast Alan into a bronze statue whose mawkishness the narrator rightly deplores, while Wilmslow’s house, redone from top to bottom, bears no trace of its occupant. Florence rails against the newspapers that reduce him to the stereotype of the errant scientist, and above all she misses his humor.
The afterword specifies that the book keeps Turing’s loved ones’ real names, and that Florence, the sole invented figure among them, largely draws on Lyn Irvine, Max Newman’s wife, who became Alan’s friend and confidante. Her features and way of speaking come from Jean Valentine, assigned to Bletchley Park during the war and later a volunteer guide on site into her nineties. By entrusting the most intimate memories to a fictional woman, the book remains true in the sense the afterword intends to deepen the truth of a man. The reverie it assumes, anchored to the proven facts, acts as the element of chance that Alan wanted to lodge in his machines and enables learning what the archives conceal.
A couple of decades after Southampton, Alan reconstructs certain nights to fall back asleep after a nightmare, “that moment of animal happiness on the railing”, retracing it detail by detail. Jacques Marchand extends this gesture to an entire life, with the patience of a codebreaker watching for probable words in German messages. From this patience a great novel emerges, whose tenderness matches its knowledge, which lifts Alan Turing from his statue and restores to him the boy on the deck, hand on the railing, free for the first time in the scent of warm bread.
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