Enigma by Robert Harris Review

Enigma: the Nazis’ unbreakable encryption machine used to send coded messages throughout their armed forces. Secretly broken by the Allies and monitored by the geniuses at Bletchley Park, England, the Nazis’ suspicions lead them to change Enigma’s settings so that the Allies find themselves locked out in the winter of 1943 - just as an immense fleet leaves New York with precious supplies for the Allied war effort. The convoy is headed into North Atlantic waters teeming with U-Boats and no idea of where they are. It’s down to Bletchley’s finest to find a way back into Enigma in just a few days – except the last time they got back into Enigma took them ten months! Leading the charge is wicked smaht mathematician Tom Jericho, recovering from a nervous breakdown and a broken heart. But just as the Allies find themselves locked out of Enigma, Tom’s sweetheart, Claire Romilly, also working at Bletchley, goes missing along with some codes – are the two connected; was Claire a Nazi spy?

I really enjoyed Robert Harris’ second novel, Enigma. It helps that, like a lot of people, I’m fascinated by WW2 and in particular the collection of oddballs working at the top secret Bletchley Park installation, especially Alan Turing, who cameos briefly and is essentially the real life person the fictional Tom Jericho is based upon. But Harris is an exceptionally gifted writer and storyteller too who’s on top form here.

Harris masterfully blends fact and fiction in his novel. The Battle of the Atlantic, the Allies being locked out of Enigma in the winter/spring of 1943, Bletchley and the codebreaking team’s work – these remarkable events all really happened. The Claire Romilly stuff was made up though espionage during this time was of course a reality. As a result, Enigma is a very informative read and Harris skilfully brings this era vividly to life for his audience.

Jericho is clearly at least partially a portrait of Alan Turing, a key figure in the development of modern computing and perhaps most famous for his theories on AI with his Turing test, and someone I find fascinating, so it was very interesting to see how Harris wrote this clearly troubled genius as he stumbled his way through the increasingly intricate plot. And it is a complex plot but credit to Harris for never making it as indecipherable to follow for the reader as any of the codes poor Tom and his team have to grapple with. I was so impressed that even up to the final chapter there were still surprises left in the narrative.

So why not a flawless rating? Some aspects felt off. The lack of compelling characters, despite the large cast – Jericho’s the only one that really stood out to me – and the story not maintaining a consistently fast pace due to an abundance of detail. The Battle of the Atlantic storyline was much more interesting to me than the Claire storyline so it was disappointing that just as the former was getting exciting that Harris chose to drop it, never to revisit it again and only references its conclusion briefly towards the end, instead focusing on the Claire storyline exclusively. I understand why he did that but one storyline definitely suffers with comparison to the other.

On the whole though I would heartily recommend Enigma as a very entertaining and impressively researched historical fiction from one of the best British writers working today.