Enigma

“Cambridge in the fourth winter of the war: a ghost town.
A ceaseless Siberian wind with nothing to blunt its edge for a thousand
miles whipped off the North Sea and swept low across the Fens. It rattled the
signs to the air-raid shelters in Trinity New Court and battered on the boarded-up
windows of King’s College Chapel. It prowled through the quadrangles and
staircases, confining the few dons and students still in residence to their rooms.
By mid-afternoon the narrow cobbled streets were deserted. By nightfall, with
not a light to be seen, the university was returned to a darkness it hadn’t known
since the Middle Ages. A procession of monks shuffling over Magdalene Bridge
on their way to Vespers would scarcely have seemed out of place.
In the wartime blackout the centuries had dissolved.”

 

Enigma by Robert Harris

Robert Harris is my new favourite writer and ever since I read Imperium I’ve been going through his books at speed. Enigma is set in the British cryptology headquarters of Bletchley Park during World War II, where Tom Jericho – a young and brilliant mathematician, works in a team struggling to break the Germans’ seemingly impenetrable cipher ‘Enigma’. While the plot and characters are fictional, I was impressed by the way Harris captures the grim ambience of the place and time although I found out later that the book has been criticised by people who were at Bletchley Park for having little resemblance to the real wartime Bletchley Park.

No matter. The story is gripping and moves at a fast pace, taking you through many twists and turns as the plot unfolds. I love wartime stories and this is one of the best I have read; action-packed, with the added excitement of the British cryptologists’ frantic haste to unravel the mysteries of Enigma as fast as possible, even as their ships head into dangerous waters not knowing where the German submarines lie in wait.

Enigma has won good reviews and this one summed it up, quoting Peter Millar in The Times of London, who said: “This is a story of intelligence, romance, twisted logic and necessary compromise,” adding “Altogether top-class stuff.”
I thought so too.

More about the Enigma machines here.
More about Robert Harris here.