His hand paused on the ignition key. ‘Do you think, Miss Wallace,’ he said, hesitantly, ‘in view of the circumstances, we might now risk first-name terms.’
She gave him a faint smile. ‘Hester.’
‘Tom.’
They shook hands. (p.249)
The man wih the nervous breakdown
This is a thriller about a mentally disturbed man, Tom Jericho. Young, frail, over-sensitive, unusually gifted at maths, he was recruited in 1939 to work for the new top secret government code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park, a suburb of what is now Milton Keynes but was then a small town surrounded by countryside.
Bletchley Park and Enigma
Here Tom is one of the pioneers, one of the handful of mathematicians, logicians and linguists tasked with breaking the so-called Enigma code, generated by the estimated 100,000 Enigma coding machines distributed across Germany’s military operations – in the Army, the Luftwaffe, sending weather reports, intelligence, operational orders, updates back and forth to Berlin and – crucially for our hero – used to control the U-boat operations which are causing such havoc among the merchant shipping steaming daily from the US to Britain with vital supplies.
For four long years Tom works alongside the famous theorist of computers, Alan Turing, and other geniuses, as they develop the techniques and the number-crunching machines – the so-called bombes – which help them crack the Enigma codes – for there are anything up to ten different flavours or variations of the code, the one Tom has been concerned with being nick-named Shark (because it is used by the U-boats).
Over that period Bletchley has hugely expanded, with barrack-like huts springing up across the grounds of the mansion, along with a huge mess hall which can seat 600 to shovel down the disgusting war-time meals. Hundreds and then thousands more staff have arrived, to decode not only Enigma but all other German transmissions, to decode and translate and pass on to the relevant British and Allied authorities, to record and store this information in a vast archive and into innumerable work books and reference books. It’s become almost a small town devoted to the vast, compendious task of cracking and recording all German military messages.
Claire Romilly
Working ceaseless shifts, taking little care of his body or mind, Jericho is already in a delicate state when he finds himself squashed up next to an attractive worldly young woman on the train back from London – a Miss Claire Romilly. To his surprise she invites him for a date (to an amateur concert) and then, a week later, on another date to the grotty Bletchley cinema, and then back to her poky cottage out in the country, where she proceeds to seduce the embarrassed young man.
Tom is a geeky nerd to begin with, and his health was already hanging in the balance – this affair is enough to overwhelm him, physically and mentally. He becomes besotted with Claire, buying her presents, obsessing about her all the time, and they have more dates, and more sex, for a few more weeks. But then one night, as she is jokily leafing through his wallet and pockets and coat, Tom finds himself getting cross and asks, then shouts at her, to stop. Unexpectedly, Claire recoils and curls up on the bed shaking with fear. What? Was she brutalised as a child? Is this a reversion to some kind of trauma?
Tom tries to comfort her, but in the night hears her get dressed, tiptoe downstairs and leave. And from that moment onwards she blanks him: in the grounds of the park, in the mess hall, in the town. Pathetically, Tom spends all his savings on a ring and tries to present it to her on the busy roadway of the park during a congested shift change while the crowds bump around them. She laughs in his face and tells him to keep it.
He has a complete nervous collapse, is diagnosed unable to work by the Park doctors, and shipped back to Cambridge, where rooms are found in his old college (Kings) for this genius who has worked himself to exhaustion for his country.
Return to Bletchley
And this is where the novel opens, in the quiet of a Cambridge college a few weeks later, with Tom trying to rebuild his mind – his consciousness a barren landscape across which shreds and memories of his work, as well as moments of bliss and moments of despair from the affair, roam like ghosts. For the first fifty pages or so we are partly in his present, in the cold Cambridge rooms, and partly transported to his memories of work, of Bletchley’s rapid expansion, and painful memories of his intimacies with the beautiful blonde Claire.
When out of the blue there is a knock on the door and one of his Bletchley colleagues enters – tall, posh Guy Logue. They want him back. They need him. Is he ready to come? And so the novel really gets going with Tom wrapped in an overcoat, being driven through the winter night from Cambridge back to Bletchley. Here he must painfully say hello again to colleagues who thought he’d gone for good, who know about his humiliating collapse. And all the time he is haunted by her, by Claire. Will he see her again? What will she say? Will her attitude have changed?
The military situation
What he learns is that Shark is proving as intractable as ever. For several good months, the team had been able to crack Shark due to the good luck of having intercepted some open messages which allowed them to work out the encryption code. But only a week or so before his breakdown a new variation of the code had been issued to all its users in a new booklet distributed by U-boat command, since which point Shark has become completely unreadable to our chaps. Hundreds of messages are brought in every day, consisting of clusters of random letters, and the analystst know they contain vital information about the whereabouts and plans of the U-boat wolf packs. But despite the best efforts of the assembled mathematicians and despite the 30 or so big ‘bombes’ or code-calculating devices which have been developed over the previous few years, Shark has reverted to being a frustrating black hole.
Tom is taken along to a high-level meeting chaired by the head of Bletchley, attended by some men from his hut and some new faces, a British Rear-Admiral and several high ranking Americans. They explain that three huge convoys have set sail from New York for England, each carrying over 5,000 troops and civilians as well as some million tonnes of food, raw materials and munitions. It is absolutely vital that Bletchley crack their way back into Shark, as soon as possible. Pointing to the map, the chief indicates they have precisely four days until the convoys enter the zone normally patrolled by the U-boats, four days to crack the code and locate the enemy. Four days. (In all his books Harris likes to emphasise important points with italics.)
Claire’s cottage
Meanwhile, after days of fruitless searching for Claire, Tom finally steels himself to cycle one evening out to the country cottage she shares with another girl, Hester Wallace, who also works at Bletchley, in another hut from the cryptanalysts. Neither of the women are home and so Tom, remembering where the key is kept, lets himself in. He wanders the empty rooms, scenes of his recent shattering passion. He goes up to her room, lies on the bed, reliving it all; then in a fit of rage, sweeps everything off the dressing table and tips out the chest of drawers. It is only then he realises the squeaky floorboard he remembers is no longer squeaky. Rolling back the carpet he sees it has been replaced with a short length of new planking secured by new screws. He undoes them and reaches into the dusty space and…. pulls out some top secret intercept messages. It is absolutely forbidden to remove all materials from the base.
What the hell are they doing in Claire’s room? Is… is Claire a spy?
As he sits pondering and confused, he hears a bicycle coming up the gravelly track, he calls her name and runs down the stairs but whoever it is has turned and is heading off into the night by the time he reaches the front door. One of Claire’s lovers? Or a co-conspirator?
Chasing the intercepts
When Claire fails to appear over the next few days, her absence is reported to the police and a creepy posh policeman named Wigram appears, who is managing the investigation into her disappearance – a drawling, swearing, über-confident public school type.
Hester and Tom have by now become co-investigators both of Claire’s disappearance and Tom has confided in her about the stolen forms. Tom reveals that not only the originals of the messages Claire stole have been removed from the relevant filing cabinet, but in fact the entire record of transmissions from that radio source are missing. Why? Mystery. In fact Tom later quizzes his boss and discovers that not only has this file and its contents been removed but further intercepts of that particular radio station are to be handed over without being decoded. No further decoding from that station. Orders from the highest levels. More mystery…
Undeterred, Hester and Tom realise the only way to get the full context and all the messages from the banned source (and thus shed light on Claire’s disappearance) would be to go and visit the radio intercept base which first recorded them, transcribed them and sent them to Bletchley. (Bletchley doesn’t actually intercept the radio signals: that is done by a web of other locations around the Midlands and beyond, the coded messages being transcribed, and then couriered to Bletchley for decoding. When possible.)
So our intrepid duo borrow a car, evade Wigram and his cops, who are now monitoring all the entrances to the Park, and go on a long night-time drive to Beaumanor to steal the original uncoded intercepts which Claire’s stolen ciphers are based on. There is a long sequence where they have to put up with being shown around the place by the blustery old colonel who runs it, before Hester distracts him and Tom sneaks into the archive/storage room, finds the files for the month and week of the mystery messages, and steals the original records of them – files which contain eleven sequences of words written in code.
They make their escape from the over-hospitable colonel and drive back towards Bletchley, the tension ratcheted up when a car which had been following them, turns on a flashing blue light and siren. Against type, Tom guns the engine and pulls out onto a main road at top speed, only just avoiding being crushed to death by a massive tank transporter. He drops Hester in the lane by her cottage, then drives carefully into Bletchley – sees police waiting outside his boarding house – drives on and stashes the car near the Park.
But for all these precautions, when Hester returns to the cottage she is picked up by Wigram’s police. They drive her to a deserted building near an old workings and lake where she is shown clothes belonging to Claire covered in blood, Hester is sick. The police tell her Claire was obviously bludgeoned with a brick, stripped and thrown into the lake. They are sending for divers.
Tom cracks the code
Meanwhile, Tom arrives back at his hut in Bletchley in time for his shift, puts in the hours trying to decrypt the German messages surrounding the U-boat attacks on the ill-fated convoys, but all the time is nervously impatient to get some time alone in the main house at Bletchley, where they store the actual physical Enigma machines which have been captured or stolen over the years. Here he experiments with various settings trying to crack the intercepts he stole from Beaumanor, and the reader is peering over his shoulder and into his mind, following his complex thought processes – until he has a breakthrough!
Suddenly he can read the eleven messages which have so mysteriously gone missing from the Bletchley file and they appal him. They are messages sent back to its Wehrmacht HQ by a German unit in Poland which has stumbled across a mass grave of Polish officers. Slowly the size of the death pits emerge – there are maybe as many as 10,000 bodies murdered and buried there. This is the so-called Katyn massacre, where the entire officer class of the Polish Army was murdered by Russian forces on Stalin’s orders. Why? To destroy the nation, to permanently deprive it of its leadership class, to reduce it to eternal servitude.
Having deciphered all eleven messages Tom begins to piece together what must have happened here at Bletchley. There is a Polish cryptanalyst in his hut, Jozef Pukowski, nick-named Puck. Claire had begun an affair with Puck. Puck, suspecting something is amiss in his native land, is alerted when a whole batch of messages from a source in Poland is suddenly confiscated and banned, and so asks Claire to get the intercepts via a different route, which her work gives her access to. Between them they read the messages about the Katyn massacres. And Puck’s father’s name is among the dead.
Once they’d read them, Puck would have realised why these particular messages were so sensitive that all the material had been confiscated and further monitoring of this station banned, the order coming from ‘the highest levels’. Why? Because murderous Uncle Joe Stalin is now – since Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 – ‘our gallant ally’. The last thing Churchill wants is news to leak out about Stalin’s bestial behaviour, news which would demoralise the British public and our armed forces. Hence the complete clampdown on the intercepts.
And, Tom realises, hence Puck’s disgust and despair, at Russian atrocity and British hypocrisy – and his determination to avenge himself on the Russians any way he can. And the simplest way would be to exploit his privileged position at Bletchley and tell the Germans that we, Stalin’s allies, had cracked Enigma. When Claire realised what he was doing, Puck killed her… Or so Tom hypothesises. He likes puzzles, he lives for puzzles. He thinks he’s cracked this one.
Chasing Puck
Now, in a mad rush to confirm whether his fears are true, Tom smuggles himself over the Bletchley perimeter fence (Wigram’s police are closing in) and hurries into Bletchley, to Puck’s digs. His landlady says Puck’s up in his room, but the room is empty and the window is open. In a fever of anxiety, Tom follows his spoor, down to the bottom of the garden, over the wall and along alleyways to the nearby train station. As a train pulls in, Tom sights Puck getting aboard it and just manages to run over the bridge, up to the platform and jump onboard himself.
The novel climaxes with the train being routed into a siding just as Tom burst into Puck’s compartment. The Pole waves a gun around, then leaps off the train and runs off across the fields. Tom, dazed, almost delirious with fatigue, follows him, desperate to find out the truth, but the Pole turns and fires wildly, at which there is a volley of returning fire. Wigram is there along with soldiers. They are closing in on Puck. He turns and shoots and this time is cut down by half a dozen bullets and Tom, too, is hit, falls, loses consciousness.
Epilogue
The creepy police official Wigram comes to visit Tom in hospital and tells him the full story. Claire had an affair with Puck. Puck suspected bad news back home but then the Katyn intercepts confirmed it and decided him to treason. When Tom went to Claire’s empty cottage, it was Puck who cycled up to visit her. Recognising Tom’s voice Puck thinks he might be reuniting with Claire in which case there is a strong risk Claire will tell Tom about Puck and they will both betray him to the authorities. Somehow Puck lures Claire to a meeting at the disused factory, bludgeons her to death and throws her body in the lake.
Years earlier, on his escape route out of occupied Europe, Puck had made various contacts, including with a Portuguese fixer. Now he has reactivated the contact and begun passing messages to him to pass on to the German attaché in Lisbon, claiming the British have cracked Enigma. But the Germans don’t believe it – Europe is swarming with con men and liars – and about something this momentous they need to be certain. They pass the message that they want to interview Puck in person, and so the train he’d been on had been taking him to Liverpool, from where he would catch a boat to Ireland and rendezvous with a U-boat off the Irish coast.
But Wigram had known about him for some time, had let him handle the intercepts, conspire with Claire in order to establish his network. Thus Wigram was aware Puck was going to the train, had had it rerouted, had had his soldiers ready at the siding to take Puck prisoner but he leapt from the train before it stopped and Tom saw the rest. Wigram wanted Puck captured alive but when he started to shoot, his men shot back.
The real story
Tom lies in bed, recovering from his wounds, and decides Wigram is lying. It’s too neat and it doesn’t quite fit the facts.
After weeks of recuperation Wigram takes Tom to Bletchley station and loads him onto a train back to Cambridge. For him the war is over. Except that he gets off at the next stop and catches a train to London. Tom goes to the Registry of births and deaths at Somerset House to confirm his hunch, and then goes to see Claire’s posh father. He has discovered that Claire Romilly died aged six. Her sad, wasted father invites Tom into his big, echoey, empty, dust-sheet-shrouded house and tells him the truth.
Wigram is in British Intelligence. He wanted to plant a spy in Bletchley. Through the public school old boy network he knew of Romilly, his posh background, his dead daughter. He approached Romilly and asked if he could use his daughter’s identity as a cover. Thus, with a false name and identity, the woman known as Claire entered Bletchley and set about taking numerous lovers, in order to spy on them. Puck was the last of them – from Wigram’s point of view, she struck gold, finding a genuine spy – and she went along with Puck’s intercept stealing so that Wigram could find out what Puck was doing with the information.
It’s true that it was Puck who cycled up to Claire’s cottage that fateful night, and recognised Tom’s voice, and feared he might discover the intercepts and betray them – but with the big difference that he and Claire faked Claire’s death, pretending Puck was a murderer a) in order for Claire (who he genuinely loved) to escape b) because he was going to be out of the country in less than 24 hours anyway. Puck went to his death never realising Claire was spying on him.
So the woman who so bedazzled Tom – whatever he real name is – is still alive. Still alive but he will never be able to find her. A sadder and a wiser man Tom makes his way back to Cambridge, knowing that she is alive, knowing he will never see her again.
Conclusions
Confusing? A little. Believable? Just about. Through all the contortions of the plot comes the powerful rabbit punch of the historically true Katyn Massacre. Another huge historical atrocity which boggles the mind.
And also, despite the twists and turns of the thriller narrative, the book evinces a powerful sense of the challenges and complexity and frustrations of living with Enigma, eating, breathing, drinking Enigma, of the highs and lows of the code-breaking community at Bletchley. In his afterword Harris thanks the many Bletchley veterans he spoke to, and the book is so vivid that, as one critic says on the cover, it’s as if you’re there, living that life.
A big part of which is the sights and sounds and smells of drab wartime Britain with its appalling food, the frustrations of the blackout and rationing, the crampedness of wartime life. All of which help to foster the claustrophobic sense of constriction which makes the novel so powerful, so gripping.
Enigma compared with Fatherland
Both are about the Second World War – though admittedly Fatherland is set 20 years later, and in a parallel universe where the Nazis won the war. Still – the war, its outcome and consequences, and horror of its atrocities, dominate both books.
Both are about one man, a maverick and loner who defies the authorities, who sets out to discover a dark secret at the heart of the ‘system’ – Xavier March the conscientious Nazi policeman in Fatherland; Tom Jericho, the gifted mathematician and cryptanalyst in Enigma.
In both books the hero joins forces with an unexpectedly tough female helper – Charlie Maguire, the clever and resourceful journalist in Fatherland; Hester Wallace, the dowdy feminist clerical assistant, angry at being prevented from reaching her full potential by patronising sexist men, in Enigma.
Both books feature a long, dangerous car journey – March’s final, doomed drive hundreds of miles East to Auschwitz in Fatherland; Tom and Hester’s night-time drive to Beaumanor, one of the satellite stations where German signals are intercepted, and then the perilous drive back climaxing in a car chase, in Enigma.
Both novels rotate around acts of bestial, mass atrocity – the Holocaust in Fatherland and the Katyn murder of Poland’s officer class in Enigma. Both books send shivers up your spine at the sheer horror of the Second World War and at the disgusting behaviour of human beings during the terrible twentieth century, the Century of Catastrophes.
And both books impose a tight time-frame on the protagonists to create a sense of nailbiting urgency, in fact the identical time-frame – of four days: four days until the Führertag for Xavier March to get to the bottom of the mystery murders and save his career, possibly his life, in Fatherland; four days for Tom and his colleagues to break back into the Shark code, before the German U-boats start attacking the convoys and killing men and women.
Style
Both stories are told by a third person narrator who leans over and merges at various points with the thoughts, ideas and feelings of their protagonist. However, I think Harris has made a deliberate attempt to deploy different styles in each book. The non-British setting of Fatherland allowed Harris to use a fast-moving hard-boiled prose which, of course, owed a lot to the American thriller tradition.
Enigma, by contrast, opens in the hallowed setting of a Cambridge college quad and mingles with the posh public school chaps at Bletchley Park, in the Admiralty and Army and so on. Therefore its prose is noticeably more English and traditional. I think it must be deliberate that not only the characters but the narrator, revert from the hard-boiled tough guy prose of Fatherland, to a self-consciously correct English prose which insists on a rather out-of-date politeness and grammatical correctness.
The horror of war
It is always in the background, blotted out for long stretches by the breathless pace of the central narrative, but Harris is careful to remind us of the reality of the war, and that the whole point of Enigma is that it gives instructions to German forces dedicated to killing us and, in this specific instance, orders to the U-boat packs which are converging on the merchant convoys in the Atlantic.
On a handful of vivid and upsetting occasions Harris has characters remind us what this actually means:
- the convoy of vulnerable ships, carrying sailors, troops, as well as Red Cross women, protected by a handful of decrepit warships
- commanded – in an extra bitter twist – by a captain whose first big command it is
- tossed and bobbed on the stormy and freezing cold Atlantic waves
- watching the ship next to them suddenly explode, men and women jumping into the sea to freeze to death or managing to evacuate into lifeboats, which will be ignored and not rescued as the rest of the convoy steams at full speed in a desperate bid to escape their hunters
- men and women blown up, burned to death, frozen to death or drowned
In one of the several cruel ironies in the book, Harris has Tom patiently explain to his hut full of oddballs and geniuses, that they need as many messages as possible from the attacking U-boats in order to stand a chance of noticing patterns which can then be run through the bombes to see if they work, to crack the code. But getting that sufficient number of messages means they need the U-boats to make contact with the convoy and attack. It is a wicked irony, which several of the characters debate bitterly: in order to get enough intercepts to decode, the cryptanalysts need the U-boats to sight and sink Allied ships. Each ship blown up and sunk triggers another message back to base from the attacking U-boat; the more of our ships sunk, the more human beings blown up, burned to death or drowned – the better for the analysts in Hut 3 at Bletchley. Some of them are made physically sick by the horror of the situation they find themselves in.
Credit
Enigma by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 1995. All quotes and references are to the 1996 Arrow Books paperback edition.
The movie
Enigma was made into a movie released in 2001. It was directed by Michael Apted from a screenplay by Tom Stoppard and with a soundtrack by John Barry. This is a promising team but somehow the movie never really gels, partly because it looks like it was made on a shoestring, the picture having a cheap video feel and the action scenes very stagey and underwhelming.
It stars six-foot-tall, dour Scotsman, Dougray Scott, pretending to be the short, nerdy intellectual Tom Jericho, and bosomy Kate Winslet pretending to be the thin, dowdy Hester Wallace, neither all that convincing.
Among other striking changes to the plot of the novel, the main one is that Tom and Hester fall in love during their goosechase, and the movie ends with them after the war, happily married with a baby on the way. This is a grotesque sell-out of the much more believable, edgy and arm’s length relationship they have in the novel, but I guess it’s the law that an action movie must have a heterosexual love affair at its core.
Similarly, an action movie must have a fight scene and things going bang, no matter how pointless and badly done. Thus the novel ends with Puck shot running across a field, leaving the recuperating Tom to listen to Wigram’s account of events and then slowly piece together his own alternative, much cleverer, solution. This is intelligent. It taxes the mind to follow Tom’s thought processes and juxtaposing the two interpretations of the same set of events is intellectually and aesthetically satisfying.
In the ludicrous climax to the movie, on the other hand, Puck escapes across the field, vanishing from the police’s clutches. Back at the hut the next morning, when Tom hears that a lone U-boat has been reported heading towards the coast of Scotland, he remembers seeing a postcard of an isolated loch in Scotland in Claire’s bedroom. Bingo! It must be where they’re planning their escape from. Tom runs out to his car and drives from Bletchley to the Scottish Highlands, arriving at the very minute when Puck is getting into a little motorboat to putter out to the U-boat. Only running full pelt down the hillside does Tom make it to the end of the pier just as the boat pulls clear and only by dint of a super-human leap does he land in the back of the boat where he rolls straight into a very stagey fight with Puck.
Puck has the gun. No, Tom knocks it out of his hands and it goes skidding across the deck of the boat. Now both men throw themselves towards it and try to hold each other back. Tom makes a big reach but his fingers are just inches from the barrel. Then Puck throws Tom off to one side and himself almost makes it to the gun when – wow! – Tom grabs him and pulls it back. One of them finally grabs the gun and they roll around in the back of the boat both hands trying to point it towards the other. Goodness, the tension and excitement! I’ve only seen this exact scene about a thousand times before. Do you think the bad guy will win? Do you, children? Because this has become a film for seven year-olds, about as challenging as the Famous Five. Tom finally gets full hold of the gun and stands as if to threaten Puck who, in that split second, takes a swing at him with a boathook which knocks Tom into the sea.
Which is lucky really, because as a cheap model U-boat surfaces near the boat, Wigram (who has been lazily watching the whole thing through binoculars from a nearby hillside) calls in a British plane which dives low and blows up the U-boat and Puck. BOOM! Another boom even bigger than the first boom! Wow. They must have been on a really tight budget to be forced to use such cheap and cheesy special effects. So no more Jerry and no more nasty traitor. Cut to Dougray Scott flailing around in the water, looking appalled at being trapped in such a third-rate, low-budget thriller. And then cut to him and Kate Winslet spooning over her pregnant bulge in a happy, happy post-War London.
Is it a law that TV and film adaptations of books must make them duller, less imaginative, more clichéd, more sexist, more violent and more insultingly stupid?
Related links
- Enigma (the novel) on Amazon
- Enigma (the movie) on Amazon
- Robert Harris’s website
- Robert Harris Wikipedia article
- Enigma machine Wikipedia article
Robert Harris’s thrillers
1992 Fatherland – Berlin 1964. Germany won the Second World War. Xavier March is a cop in Berlin, capital of the huge German Empire. The discovery of a corpse in a lake leads him on an increasingly nail-biting investigation into the dark heart of the Nazi regime and its most infamous secret which, in this terrifying parallel universe, has been completely buried.
1995 Enigma – Bletchley Park 1943, where a motley collection of maths, computer and coding geniuses are trying to crack the Germans’ Enigma codes. The hero – weedy geek Tom Jericho – discovers that the gorgeous, sexy woman who seduced him and then as casually dumped him a month later, is in fact a spy, stealing top secret intercepts from the base for her Polish lover. Or is she?
1998 Archangel – Dr Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso, a populist historian of contemporary Russia, stumbles across one of the secrets of the century – that the great dictator Josef Stalin had a son, brought up by communist fanatics in the forests of the frozen north, who is now ready to return to claim his rightful position as the ‘Great Leader’ and restore Russia to her former glory.
2007 The Ghost – The gripping story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a ghost writer called in to complete the memoirs of former UK Prime Minister Adam Lang (a thinly disguised portrait of Tony Blair) after the previous writer died mysteriously. Marooned with the politico and his staff in a remote mansion on the coast of New England, the ghost writer slowly uncovers a shattering conspiracy.
2011 The Fear Index A series of bizarre incidents plague American physics professor-turned-multi-billionaire hedge fund manager, Alex Hoffmann. Slowly it becomes clear they are all related to the launch of the latest version of his artificial intelligence program – VIXEL-4 – designed to identify and manage anxiety and fear on the financial markets, but which has gone significantly, bewilderingly, beyond its money-making remit.
2013 An Officer and a Spy A long, absorbing fictional recreation of the Dreyfus Affair which divided France at the end of the 19th century, seen from the point of view of a French army officer who played a key role in the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus as a German spy, and then slowly, to his horror, uncovers the evidence which proves that Dreyfus was innocent all along, and his trial one of the great miscarriages of justice in history.
Books & Boots 