First I must say this: if you have any interest in the interaction between, on the one hand, people willing to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs and their country, and on the other, office-political self-interest, read this book if you can. As an eye-opener, it bitterly counter-echoes Macaulay's "None were for the party, all were for the state." Irrespective of anybody's opinion, adverse or otherwise, read it if you want unusual material on several subjects, including Giske's masterful exploitation of his penetration of the WWII Dutch resistance. Read it also if you simply are interested in cryptology, the history of cryptology or the development of cryptology (or of cryptologists). Read it if you want a vivid portrayal of the fog of war as seen from the back room, the frustration, the obsession, the pressures, the fear and the grief. Prepare yourself to control your blood pressure if you have views (from EITHER perspective) on the subject of boffin versus boss. The book is a primary and secondary document of great interest.
"Between silk and cyanide" includes plenty of humour of all shades, mainly dark, but don't read it for fun unless you are totally insensitive; it deals with harrowing events in harrowing times and I found it very upsetting on several levels. It would be wasteful to read it in a hurry just because you are a fast reader. This is a labyrinth of a book and there are many mazes of twisty little passages, all alike, that you very likely will miss if you are not careful. Heaven knows how many I myself skated over in my innocence.
This is a large book, but that is not why it is not to be read at a sitting. Nor is the reason that it is hard to read; I had to stop repeatedly to rest and to digest (or recover from) the situations and implications described. I am not so sure how well I like the style, but it impressed me as true to life. It includes a great deal of oral boffinese, not the technospeak, but the throw-away witticisms that bubble up from the depths of overactive or overwrought minds. Boffins are not supposed to laugh at them because they understand them and non-boffins rarely do because they seldom enjoy them when they do understand them. The problem is that such wit is more irritating in the written than the oral medium. After all, most of such cracks are tasteless or trivial. In other respects the writing itself is clear, natural, and far more literate than most wartime reminiscences. Mind you, Marks, intelligent and compelling as he is, is no John Masters or R. V. Jones, but then, comparison with such would set unrealistic standards for anyone. Be all that as it may, the sheer tragedy of the times repeatedly yielded nightmares painful to a reader conditioned to quips. "... I found myself staring into eyes full of dead pilots." If you really want to understand the intensity of the hurt or the nausea of such remarks, read the book.
On technical and historical matters also, this book is of interest at several levels. On one hand it repeatedly amazes one with the brilliance of some the work they did, and on the other it leaves one breathless at some of the things they apparently struggled to achieve. To anyone with modern computer experience, the idea of having difficulty in designing a letter-based one time pad surely must be totally bemusing; am I too blasé because of long occupational exposure to the concept of arbitrary radix arithmetic? I am not stupid enough to think that I would have done any better in their place at that time, but I still do not quite know what to make of this. Several other cryptographic inventions discussed (but not all) are pretty trivial in terms of information theory, which is puzzling in the light of the highly non-trivial minds that are generally known to have been employed in the field at that time. Also, there are non-cryptographic technical details that I should have loved to discuss. For example, in a period of desperate austerity the insistence on printing agents' reference material on silk puzzles me. The justification was that silk fabric was easy to burn and to conceal in clothing. I should have thought that treating rayon or even very fine cotton with nitrocellulose would have been cheaper and more effective.
But I don't know the real-life situation. I wish I did.
But not at first hand, thank you.
Marks himself was an unusual, brash, understandably not very modest, and clearly insecure young man, and he conveys his unusualness with a clinical wryness that spares neither himself nor anyone else. He is too skilled to leave me convinced that he is artless in every word he writes about himself, his favourites or his unfavourites, but if his story is substantially imaginary, this book is one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century. If you disagree, try reading any (and I mean ANY) fictional blockbuster of comparable size and themes, whether historical romances or hard fiction, and try to find one that carries anything like the same conviction. Don't hurry to call me to compare notes. For my part I accept the book at face value as reminiscences from a retentive memory, supported by notes, slanted by personal perspective, and eroded by time. One can hardly demand better than that, especially in the light of the nauseating closing chapters, the loss of history and the closing in of the janitors and the of the vultures and parasites after the fray. As I read it, the book is a striking work dealing with arresting material, and it is absorbing, though heartbreaking, material to read.
