Enigma

Rating:
Summary: Exciting!
Review: This book is a must read for anyone who likes smart, savvy adventure mysteries.

The main character is Tom Jericho, a mathematician and cryptoanalysist who works in a government building in Britain, trying to crack the Nazi Enigma code known as Shark. Tom and his team manage to crack Shark a month ago, but the Nazis have set up a new version that makes Shark, which already has several million ways of encoding, just 26 times harder. Jericho is overworked and tired, and distraught over his girlfriend, Claire, dumping him, but he is sent back to help the team crack the new code. The Nazi U Boats are planning an attack in 4 days, and the code is virtually impossible to crack in that amount of time. To make things worse, Jericho finds that Claire is missing under very strange circumstances. Jericho must deal with the constant memories of Claire, and team up with Hester, Claire's roomate, and his many co-workers to solve the mystery of the Shark.

The book is very intelligently written. Harris knows exactly what he is talking about, from historical facts to every little detail of the Enigma machines and codes. He delivers these facts to you in an engaging style that keeps you riveted. This book is NEVER boring. Even the long passages about the codes and mathematics are so interesting the pages just fly by. I'm a person who detests math with all my heart, but this book manages to capture my interest and hold it.

I'm amazed at how the characters are portrayed. They're all superbly characterized, even the very minor ones, each with their own unique speaking style and actions and motives. The characters are so realistic that you're able to see all them and REMEMBER all twenty or so main characters as if you've known them all before.

The pacing of the book is fast, but manages to deliver romance and deep thinking without dragging the book down. The superb, complex plot, the characters, and the intriguing details make you want to go back and read it again.

Note: you'll probably need a dictionary or at least some knowledge of WW2 to fully understand all the terms and references in this book.

One thing is for certain, you'll put down Enigma enlightened to a lot more about WW2, in addition to having read a great book.

Rating:
Summary: another thoughtful thriller
Review: 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-

Rating:
Summary: Good Read
Review: It was hard to put this book down. As a former navy cryptologic technician and a current software engineer, this book held a special interest for me. But you need be neither to enjoy this book. I have to admit, though, that I felt a little disappointed with the ending. Too much had to be "explained" via a final dialog to make all the pieces fit together. Still, a good read and recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A different Spy novel
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: breaking enigma
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Thrilling and moving
Review: I like all Robert Harris's books but this is definitely the best for me. The relationship between troubled genius Tom Jericho and Claire is very believable and the code-breaking facts are fascinating. But unlike many books rooted in fact, this doesn't get too bogged down in the details and the characters are allowed to breathe. I also really liked the wartime atmosphere.

Rating:
Summary: Classic nail-biting fiction
Review: This book is an amazing historical detective story: the German Enigma code has been cracked and the Allied forces are close to winning the crucial Battle of the Atlantic. Suddenly, the code is changed and it is obvious that there is a traitor in the midst. The code-cracking hero then finds that his girlfriend is missing, leaving incriminating evidence in her room...
Psychologically well-observed characters, particularly the hero, propel this book into classic nail-biting fiction. The battle of good and evil is played out on both the world stage and the personal one, ending with a race-against-time chase. This book is a beautifully-observed portrait of the rigors of war, the lack of glamour in the code-breaking world, and that old favorite - given a new twist here - the agony of unrequited love.

Rating:
Summary: The origin of digital era
Review: Harris has a distinguished and unique style in writing a thriller in a historical environment. Taking into account the Bletchley Park was among the most challenging tasks undertaken during wartime, and cryptography among the most elusive problems analysts had to deal with, the result is highly interesting, even if the thread reels out a bit slow. Several components contribute to the global structure: the academic remembrances of the main character (the mathematician Tom Jericho, through which you can detect the underlying and haunting figure of Turing), entangled with his sentimental troubles, the faithful description of activities and organization of Bletchley Park, echoes of U-Boot war, hints of events placed at the beginning of digital calculators (in a sentence, it is mentioned the possible construction of a calculator using transistors in place of relay-based "bombes")
A must read for people who has appreciated Fatherland.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining but for the mathemathician's part (THICK).
Review: The plot is good, the writing too, but a little boring (action is enforced in a way to live up the thing but fails to be beliavable at all...). "The Eye of the Neddle" is a much better action read if you know what I mean.
It verges on an History Channel Production instead of a thriller.

After seeing the film I must add the following:
I forgot to mention the tragic history of the polish (officers&civilian) caught between Hitler and Stalin, really the sadest thing to read about... think also about the RAF pilots from countries wich after Yalta and the end of the war turned back to HOME behind the Iron Curtain... in some cases to be confined or sentenced to death, among tragedys to chose from...Really WWII was a low point in the human (?) race development/history...
All in all really a very sad subject as wars tend to be...
Curiously, I have seen the film and it's brilliant on his own, probably one of this exceptions where the film is better then the novel (or easiest to digest), recommended to all who enjoyed the novel and even more to those who did not read it... (somehow if you see the film before it will take out the pleasure from the book, well, take a choice for yourself...)
Incidentally try to spot Mr (Sir) Mick Jagger seated in the background of a dancing club (as film producers should...).
In the end a sad but very good history and better film. Really nearly five stars (so make it 4,5).

Rating:
Summary: interesting read
Review: One of the best books that i have ever read. One should know what an "Enigma" is before opening the book. i think, that will make an interesting read.