“These signals had never been broken. Their secrets were intact. They were virgin.“
To my great frustration and delight, I’d completely forgotten most of Enigma upon my rereading, so I got to discover it fresh a second time, but this time I resolved to read the book more slowly this time to truly digest it. Enigma is Harris’s second novel, and explores Bletchley Park during World War Two. The book gives us a view into a critical Allied advantage in the war, and explores the consequences for the Battle of the Atlantic of being shut out of Enigma. Into this world, Harris drops an additional domestic espionage problem, when the protagonist Tom Jericho’s ex-girlfriend goes missing, and it seems there is a spy trying to leak Bletchley Park’s secrets to the Nazis.
Enigma is a far more convincing study than the movie The Imitation Game, also about Bletchley Park, where characters you’d expect to know better had to have basic things explained to them so we could get it. In particular, the movie made Turing the sole father of the bombe, without giving any credit to the Polish cryptographers who first conceived of a mechanical device to decrypt Enigma. In fact, Turing’s contribution was to build a machine that could break Enigma after the Nazis made the Engima too difficult for the original Polish cryptanalysts to break. Harris has the advantage of writing novel, where the narrator can explain what we need to know, and the book also isn’t trying to tell Turing’s story, so it need not stretch facts as much to make the man the sole hero.
The work of Bletchley Park was top secret and critical. It involved the invention of the first mechanical computers, a dash of luck, enemy mistakes and round the clock effort to decrypt Enigma, and lots of compromises to keep the secret. Not every piece of intelligence could be acted upon, lest the Germans discover that Enigma was broken. The work of Bletchley Park remained top secret and none of their achievements were publicly known. Enigma dramatizes the human cost of this in the form of Tom Jericho, a genius with photographic memory, who has had a public breakdown after overwork and heartbreak, but is nonetheless brought back after Germany changes their naval Enigma procedures that leads to the bombe being unable to decrypt messages and so allow convoys to safely cross the Atlantic
The best spy novels lean into the grey morality of being a spy, and that constant danger that comes from not knowing who is on your side. At some point, it transpires that a key breakthrough to break into Germany’s naval Enigma involves receiving a lot of messages indicating upcoming attacks. Do you hope for a convoy to suffer more attacks so you get more messages? Do you hope they go free and the goods Britain needs arrive safely? Does it matter what you hope given you have no control anyway? There’s a strange powerlessness to what Bletchley Park does: these folk know more about German military secrets than most of the German military, yet are helpless to directly intervene in any way.
But the key plot comes from Jericho’s ex-romantic interest, Claire, who becomes the centre of interest from British intelligence. The story is suffused with paranoia as Jericho works against both his own colleagues and government and Claire herself to discover her secret. The ending is full of twists and suspense, and I was completely sold on it. But I get that it doesn’t have the same impact as in Fatherland, since it’s not possible to pretend that the World War Two Britain is a totalitarian evil on the scale of Nazi Germany. But the book does highlight something that reminds us of the messy compromises of war. World War Two wasn’t just the angels versus the monsters. A lot of messy compromises were made involving some very bad people. Stalin, anyone?
I have always loved the story of the cryptanalysis of the Enigma, and Harris has taken a topic that is very dry and complex and managed to dramatize it into a brilliant and engrossing spy thriller. This book is for everyone: for those who love history, for those who love mathematics, for those who love spy thrillers, for those who love thrillers in general, and those that just want a good yarn. It won’t let you down.
Wet Broken Things 