Customer Reviews

Enigma (Paragon Softcover Large Print Books)

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In his terrific speculative thriller, Fatherland, Robert Harris plopped us down in the middle of an alternate reality where Nazi Germany had won a stalemate with the United States and Hitler was about to celebrate his 75th birthday in 1964. The book was plausible and very exciting, but best of all it confronted readers with the similarity between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and implicitly asked why the west fought one and aided the other. Now, in Enigma, he shows that he can work equally effectively against the backdrop of actual events and still broach big ideas.

It's February, 1943 and Tom Jericho, a brilliant young Cambridge mathematician and protégé of Alan Turing, has already suffered one nervous breakdown under the pressure of working to break secret Nazi codes. Now he's summoned back to Bletchley Park because the U-boat code, known as Shark, which was previously decrypted due to an epiphany of his, has suddenly been changed just as an enormous supply convoy from America is setting out for Britain. Despite his delicate mental state, it's felt that he'll be valuable just for his totemic value and to reassure the higher-ups that all the best men are working on the problem.

Complicating matters is the disappearance of Jericho's ex-girlfriend, Claire Romilly, who it appears may have tipped off the Germans that their codes had been cracked. At any rate, some must have betrayed this vital secret, and, even as the supply convoy sails towards one of the biggest U-boat wolfpacks ever assembled, Jericho sets out to discover who the traitor is and where Claire has disappeared too.

The author too manages a difficult feat as he balances the mystery plot with healthy dollops of WWII history and cryptographic technique. Jericho's quest for Claire is exciting enough, but it's the details about the Enigma machines, which produced what the Nazis believed to be an unbreakable codes, and the British success in breaking them anyway, which really make for fascinating reading. Then, as if that weren't enough, when Harris introduces the reason that someone at Bletchley would assist the Nazis, he returns to some of the troubling moral and geopolitical questions that he first raised in Fatherland. It all makes for a thoughtful thriller that entertains, enlightens and provokes the reader.

GRADE : A-

For captivating true life signals intelligence there are several books one can go to, including those by James Bamford on the American system (Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets) but for really getting into the enormity of the challenges and the thrill of the individual code-breakers when they succeeded, this is the book I recommend.

It completely ignores the enormous contributions made by the Poles (who gave the English two Enigma machines at the beginning of the war) as well as the heroic deeds of Tommy Brown (youngest George Medal winner at 16, survived with code materials taken from a sinking German ship), but I have found no better novel to communicate the absolute goose-bump emotional roller-coaster that the Bletchley Park gang experienced.

If anything, this novel convey a human side to code-breaking that offsets the modern-day obsession with massive computers.

LET me start off by saying that if I was a cryptanalyst in the midst of World War II who spent day after day tackling codes, working with bombes and hunting for cribs, I probably would have loved this book. But since I am a thirty-year old attorney whose most intimate contact with codes consists of the back of a cereal box, this book left a little to be desired.

SHORTLY after being introduced to Tom Jericho, the book's protagonist, the reader is thrust into the world of a cryptanalyst - one whose entire life revolves around breaking the German code called "Shark." The problem for the reader starts immediately as the decoding process is inadequately described. Not nearly enough detail is given to the intricacies of the Enigma device used to create the Shark code. Worse yet, the "explanations" of this process often includes series of jumbled letters which serve to explain the significance of each aspect of translation. I was unable to ever connect the explanations with the process itself. Sadly, the breaking of various codes is significant in both plotlines and consequently takes away from the flow of the book.

IN short, Jericho has returned to Bletchley - to his job as a cryptanalyst - for the purpose of breaking Shark a second time as the Germans mysteriously realized that the British had broken the original code. The plot is interesting (and makes for a good story), but unfortunately character development is weak. When the mystery unfolds at the end of the book - I realized that I knew hardly anything about the villain or his motivation. I had to go back and reread about this particular character to determine whether I should have known more than I did. Fortunately, the entire mystery is explained in the final chapters, but I was disappointed that in a book about code-breaking, I was never given the opportunity to crack the case on my own. I recommend that you pay close attention to everyone in Jericho's life.

AS plotline one reaches its peak, it becomes exciting - particularly as Harris describes the U-boat activity as they approach conveys of British and American ships. The cryptanalysts find themselves fighting a battle that cannot really be won. "Success" will result in devastating consequences. Overall, I enjoyed this plot.

PLOTLINE two is altogether different. Jericho is pining away for Claire who disappeared upon his return to Bletchley. He meets and befriends her roommate - Hester - as they search for Claire and learn more about the dark secrets she kept prior to her disappearance. Harris' talent shines through more clearly in this plot. His description of the interaction between Jericho and Claire, Claire and Hester and Jericho and Hester is excellent. The reader soon realizes that this story is literally separate from the other series of events described above. The surprise ending is worth the wait.

OVERALL, I would give this book three and a half stars - primarily because of the poor character development and (perhaps perhaps my own ignorance of) the complexity of the codebreaking process. I do, however, look forward to reading Fatherland in the future.

Robert Harris has done it again, after the triumph of Fatherland he has written another masterpiece thriller about the British codebreakers during The Battle of the Atlantic. Harris's hero Tom Jericho is a great mathematician and codebreaker at Bletchley Park who is out of the game due to a nervous breakdown, but is called back to Bletchley Park when the Allies find out that the Germans have changed their codes all of a sudden. The reason Jericho is called back is that since he broke the Germans's code last time, his superiors think he can do it again, but there is another element that puzzles Jericho: The girl he was having a relationship with, Claire Rommily, has stolen some cryptograms and disappeared into thin air! Suddenly the Forign Office begin an investigation on her, is there a spy in Bletchley Park? Jericho (with the help of Claire's housemate Hester Wallace) intends to find out just that. It would be a crime for me to give away any more. One of the things I loved the best in this book is Tom Jericho's character, he is a normal human being. Not Superman (as some of my favourite authors tend to do, Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum etc.). He is not particularly good looking(although I hear that Dougray Scott has been cast as him), suave or strong. I believe that with this book, Harris has proved himself to be the succesor to John LeCarre in passing on moral messages without actually writing them out loud! Please continue to delight us Mr. Harris!

With my long background in computers (since '66) and my longtime interest in codes, codebreaking & Enigma, I started this book with some trepidation - as most books of this ilk are poorly written and technically annoying. Not so with this book. It's a genuinely good read with some good plot twists - in fact, you don't know where it's going until the end. Too bad there aren't more good books like this around instead of all the Rambo trash.

This is an intelligent, well-constructed book that had me eagerly turning pages right up until the end. Robert Harris confidently takes us into the world of cryptography and cryptographers, frantically pitting human ingenuity, artificial intelligence, mechanical and electronic "bombes", and "Turin machines" (both the revolutionary precursors of our present-day computers) against predatory German submarines set on devastating merchant convoys in the Atlantic. It is an exciting, informed, and enjoyable read.

The book has been very carefully researched and accurately conveys the bleakness and weaknesses of war-weary Britain in the early 1940s. We are led into the strange and taunt world of Bletchley Park, the WWII center of British cryptographic efforts to crack the various versions of the German Enigma code. Historical fact and personalities (such enigmatic genius Alan Turin) are convincingly interwoven with a multi-leveled story of espionage and betrayal. The writing is excellent; a beautifully told story.

Towards the end of the book there is a quotation from the mathematician G. H. Hardy, "a mathematical proof, like a chess problem, to be aesthetically satisfying, must possess three qualities: inevitability, unexpectedness and economy." What is true of mathematical proofs and chess solutions is also true of good thrillers. Harris has provided us with a brilliantly different espionage book where unexpectedness is present to the final page, and a graceful economy of writing that creates a smooth and enjoyable read. Unlike many books, this is one that I will be rereading next year.

Fast paced thriller set during WWII involving the Britsh codebreakers. Enough historical accuracy about the period to make the book fascinating, enough plot line & fictional character development to keep it moving at a rapid clip that keeps you reading right through to the end of the solution to the mystery. It's one of the few thrillers I've kept on my bookshelf and read twice. Once years ago and once recently after seeing the movie by the same title. The movie didn't seem to hold true to my memory of the book's excitement and solution so I reread it and relived the pleasure of it all over again.

This is an engrossing novel about an amazing wartime secret -- the decipherment at Bletchley Park of the German military, air force, and naval codes by a gang of eccentric cryptanalysts laboring under depressing, exhausting conditions for months on end. Tom Jericho is a Cambridge mathematician with an extraordinary talent for problem-solving, who loses his heart to Claire Romilly, a clerk-typist in another section of the project. Then Claire goes missing, as do a handful of transcribed ciphered intercepts. Of course, all is not what it seems. Why did Berlin order a change in the code, and can they crack it before too many more men are lost in the North Atlantic? Why did the order come down not to decipher those particular messages? Is there a spy at Bletchley Park? Harris also makes it clear that the folks back home in dreary, shortage-ridden England were every bit as courageous, and suffered just as much, as the soldiers in the line of battle. You'll stay up late to finish this one.

Enigma is a great book about the less known side of World War 2. Not many people knew how much work was actually done behind the fighting lines. The whole war depended on how the code breakers did on hacking into the Nazi code system. This idea of breaking codes sounds extremely boring at first, but Robert Harris finds a way to make it exciting. It is also a great idea of his to add in a little mystery with Claire and not resolve it until the end of the book. Jericho is a great character for the book and he is very exciting. It is very strange that the author decided to make him sick at the beginning of the book because most people wont think of that as being nearly as hard on you as if you were fighting in the front lines of the war, but without sleep and proper food for such a long time it would eventually were you down and could very easily make you sick. The start of this book can get a little boring, but don't give up on it right away or you will miss the exciting mysteries that follow it at the end. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants an exciting book on the lesser-known side of World War 2 and wants to learn about code breaking.

Some years ago I read a spy novel where the main characters needed to escape from Nazi Germany with some info on the bad guys they'd stolen. It was very entertaining, but for me kind of silly because I'd just read a book on the British codebreakers, and I knew the information had gotten to the Allies by much more mundane means. Robert Harris turns all of this on it's head and even makes it suspenseful. Enigma is the story, in novel form, of the British codebreaking effort that won WW2, to a large extent anyway, for the Western Allies. Interwoven into the plot is a hunt for a German spy among the codebreakers, and while that story is interesting (and the solution and motive bring out another story less often told) the main focus is a novel version of David Kahn's Seizing the Enigma, with all the suspense of the codebreakers grappling with the Kriegsmarine's codes as the convoys approach the U-boats... It's a very good book.