THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 1, 1995 TAG: 9511010055
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
``A RIDDLE WRAPPED in a mystery inside an enigma.''
Although this Churchillism from a 1939 radio broadcast referred to Stalinist Russia, which plays only a distant part in ``Enigma'' (Random House, 320 pp., $23), this new World War II thriller by Robert Harris brings that quote very much to mind. And for more reasons than its title.
Harris leads us into an onion-like nesting of puzzles within puzzles, as a motley assemblage of quick minds in shabby, blitz-shaken England works to outsmart Hitler's code-makers and their ingenious encrypting machine, Enigma.
The story reaches points of almost unbearable tension as the most intuitive but most commonsensical member of the British team, youthful math whiz Thomas Jericho, spearheads - with a hunch - the cracking of the Enigma U-boat communications. He wins a pat on the back from the prime minister himself and then, suffering nervous exhaustion, is sent to lodgings at Cambridge University to recuperate.
Jericho is barely functioning again when he is yanked back to the nondescript cluster of huts at Bletchley Park. The reason: His masterstroke soon had been undone by a change in the Enigma formula by a suspicious Germany. This means not only a setback in the cryptographic war, endangering precious convoys on their way east across the Atlantic, but also a sudden desperate spy crisis:
There must have been a mole among the cryptanalysts.
Sinister twists develop right up through the final chapter as Jericho plunges ahead with a collection of information that could incriminate not only the spy but also himself. An edge-of-the-seat element is his earlier romantic involvement with a woman who may well have been the intelligence leak and whose whereabouts become a mystery.
All the time, too, Jericho and his assorted associates are worming out the key to the new system that the Germans are using on their Enigmas. Massive interception of enemy transmissions, hard brain and pencil work, and some cumbersome British-designed machines, devised to duplicate Enigma's processes, all contribute to the ultimate success.
Yet the solution comes too late to prevent terrible torpedo carnage. Ironically, the sinkings and accompanying German transmissions play a crucial role in the second conquest of Enigma.
Irony, indeed, rules the world of the cryptanalysts, a point that Harris, a former columnist for The Sunday Times of London, makes with great force. The breaking of a code is one of the most vital of state secrets, to be shielded even at the cost of allowing a known enemy attack to proceed.
One of the things that makes the Harris book so absorbing is its factuality. Enigma was real. It was deciphered. An author's note explains that while the characters are fictional, the novel is based on an actual historical event and the German messages are all genuine.
Some readers may find parts of this book too mathematical, too cryptographic. But the excitement makes up for any such hurdles. Moreover, those hurdles pleasurably intrigue other readers, including those who discovered the joys of code-breaking fiction by way of Edgar Allan Poe and the treasure documents of ``The Gold Bug.''
Beyond all this, the author's low-key portrayal of England and its people at bay, with the blackout providing more than enough murk to prickle the hair of the most blase mystery addict, is worth something all on its own.
This is a book with a hook. More than one. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB