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Customer Reviews of Enigma

A different Spy novel
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.

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another thoughtful thriller
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-

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breaking enigma
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.