I've decided that when I can't think of anything more enlivening, this blog will revert to its bibliophilic roots. So today we have Enigma by Robert Harris, which is a book I can read again and again without tiring of it.
It's a fictionalized account of the code breakers of Bletchley Park, focussing on a young Mathematician called Tom Jericho. There's a stupid sub-plot about a failed love affair and sedition in the ranks, but chiefly it's about a few clever blokes sitting in a freezing hut, trying to work out where the hell a load of evil U-boats might be lurking. It's also wonderfully detailed about the privations of the time: the ghastly food, the cold, the lack of decent light, the increasingly threadbare clothes and smelly bodies, etc.
Robert Harris' first novel, Fatherland, might get its own blog post one of these days, but for me Enigma is a good choice for those times when I haven't got the mental energy for something new or difficult, but I'm not quite bad enough for something really silly. It's a good story, but it's written well too.
The movie of the book isn't bad, but the book is better. How often this is true.
Happy Weekend.
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Hmmm. The film first robs and then pisses on Alan Turing's grave, for which the book must take some responsibility. It set the tone by marginalising Turing in favour of a more acceptable hero. All's fair in war and fiction one might say, but would Harris replace Churchill's contribution, for instance, with that of a fictionalised other? No. That would be ridiculous, and unjust.
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