REVIEW: The Enigma Game
Mar. 31st, 2025 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Enigma Game: Elizabeth Wein Bloomsbury, 2020
In the author’s note at the end, Wein herself describes her books as World War Two thrillers, I suppose I’d just add the descriptor ‘young adult.’ This is the fourth book in the Code Name Verity Cycle, following ‘The Pearl Thief’ chronologically, and about events that precede ‘Code Name Verity’ and ‘Rose Under Fire’. I don’t believe you have to have read all the others to appreciate this, but knowing about various characters and relationships mentioned in passing and what’s coming for some of the characters added depth to me. Also, if you have read all those (excellent) books, you will know that the ‘game’ in the title is a misnomer, really. It’s set during the winter of 1940-41, and mainly in Scotland and above the North Sea.
The narration is divided between three characters, one of whom is new to us. Louisa Adair is fifteen, and has recently been twice orphaned by the war. Her Jamaican father was in the Merchant Navy, and she and her English-born mother lived in Blitzed London. She needs a job, and gets one, to be the companion of an elderly German lady who is now free to leave an internment camp for people of German and other Axis nationalities on the Isle of Man, except she’s not very mobile after several falls. Mixed-race Lousia is used to prejudice and quickly has to face her own, as the remarkable Joanna Von Arneim, a former opera singer, is now going by the name Mrs Jane Werner. And is quite a character.
The two of them build a rapport, partly through their love of music, partly through their sense of being mutual outsiders, and partly because both have known grief. They come to stay with Jane’s niece by marriage at the Limehouse, a pub near an RAF base in Scotland, where one Ellen MacEwen (who readers of ‘The Pearl Thief’ will know) is staying. As a volunteer, she is the airbase’s driver. The only person who knows that she’s a Scottish Traveller is Jamie Beaufort-Stuart, who is a Flight-Lieutenant with responsibility for a squadron based there, despite not even flying for a year yet. But he’s responsible for mostly young men, some of whom have even less experience than him, and his commanding officer is a stickler who holds Jamie’s class privilege against him.
But very soon after Louisa and Jane arrives, so does a German pilot, who seems to be a double agent, there to meet British intelligence. Due to a foul-up, they never meet, and it is Louisa who realises why he came. Louisa, who is desperate to do something against the enemy that took both her parents from her, but what can a fifteen year old just out of school do? Fortunately, she finds co-conspirators. Ellen is motivated by wanting to give Jamie hope again after the loss of many men, poignantly remembered by an old tradition at the pub. She is the crucial link with a smuggled in Enigma machine, decoded and translated by Lousia and Jane, to give Jamie the edge he craves. How he explains that Pimms section knows where submarines will be is difficult, and working out the decrypted messages is sometimes a puzzler. All the while, the lads are sent out on dangerous raids, and their opponents are retaliating. Tensions arise from the youngest airmen’s habit of letting secrets slip, the prejudices of Texan Chip, the lecherousness of Bill Yorke, older than Jamie, and far too interested in the girls, the youngest of whom is Louisa.
Things get even more complicated when another German plane lands at Windyedge with a familiar face, and what are presumed to be defectors. Another familiar face, but from the rest of the books, turns up, Everyone’s very human motivations – and the loss that Jamie and Louisa, in particular, carry with them – as well as the high stakes mean it really isn’t a game. All that as well as Wein’s clever plot make this a page turner. I wanted to devour it and was fairly frustrated that the demands of live made me have to put it aside. There are no chapters, just switches of perspective, and I longed for Jane’s POV, as she does certain unwise things that worry Louisa, and for the greater perspective of her life. Her attitude is very much that this is one last adventure for her.
The ending is both shattering and satisfying, with pay-offs for superstitions, building and changing relationships and the full, harrowing story of something only mentioned in passing in CNV. The amateurish conspirators’ time with the Enigma machine comes to an end. In the author’s note, Wein admits to fudging when it came into British hands to fit with her already existing canon, but her general meticulousness about details, such as flying a Blenheim, what it would be like for a Jamaican girl like Lousia and the realities of a Scottish winter in 1940-41 add verisimilitude.
All the characters have learned from the other, with Ellen and Louisa forging a friendship (and leaving me hoping that Ellen would one day get to see Jamaica, because her future is unknown to me, while I knew how bittersweet the next few years would be for Jamie.) Louisa had come to love Jane. Like her, the brave Felix, the stickler Cromwell and all the boys become men Jamie flew with have left their mark on the reader. And the youth of the latter really leaves an impression.
In the author’s note at the end, Wein herself describes her books as World War Two thrillers, I suppose I’d just add the descriptor ‘young adult.’ This is the fourth book in the Code Name Verity Cycle, following ‘The Pearl Thief’ chronologically, and about events that precede ‘Code Name Verity’ and ‘Rose Under Fire’. I don’t believe you have to have read all the others to appreciate this, but knowing about various characters and relationships mentioned in passing and what’s coming for some of the characters added depth to me. Also, if you have read all those (excellent) books, you will know that the ‘game’ in the title is a misnomer, really. It’s set during the winter of 1940-41, and mainly in Scotland and above the North Sea.
The narration is divided between three characters, one of whom is new to us. Louisa Adair is fifteen, and has recently been twice orphaned by the war. Her Jamaican father was in the Merchant Navy, and she and her English-born mother lived in Blitzed London. She needs a job, and gets one, to be the companion of an elderly German lady who is now free to leave an internment camp for people of German and other Axis nationalities on the Isle of Man, except she’s not very mobile after several falls. Mixed-race Lousia is used to prejudice and quickly has to face her own, as the remarkable Joanna Von Arneim, a former opera singer, is now going by the name Mrs Jane Werner. And is quite a character.
The two of them build a rapport, partly through their love of music, partly through their sense of being mutual outsiders, and partly because both have known grief. They come to stay with Jane’s niece by marriage at the Limehouse, a pub near an RAF base in Scotland, where one Ellen MacEwen (who readers of ‘The Pearl Thief’ will know) is staying. As a volunteer, she is the airbase’s driver. The only person who knows that she’s a Scottish Traveller is Jamie Beaufort-Stuart, who is a Flight-Lieutenant with responsibility for a squadron based there, despite not even flying for a year yet. But he’s responsible for mostly young men, some of whom have even less experience than him, and his commanding officer is a stickler who holds Jamie’s class privilege against him.
But very soon after Louisa and Jane arrives, so does a German pilot, who seems to be a double agent, there to meet British intelligence. Due to a foul-up, they never meet, and it is Louisa who realises why he came. Louisa, who is desperate to do something against the enemy that took both her parents from her, but what can a fifteen year old just out of school do? Fortunately, she finds co-conspirators. Ellen is motivated by wanting to give Jamie hope again after the loss of many men, poignantly remembered by an old tradition at the pub. She is the crucial link with a smuggled in Enigma machine, decoded and translated by Lousia and Jane, to give Jamie the edge he craves. How he explains that Pimms section knows where submarines will be is difficult, and working out the decrypted messages is sometimes a puzzler. All the while, the lads are sent out on dangerous raids, and their opponents are retaliating. Tensions arise from the youngest airmen’s habit of letting secrets slip, the prejudices of Texan Chip, the lecherousness of Bill Yorke, older than Jamie, and far too interested in the girls, the youngest of whom is Louisa.
Things get even more complicated when another German plane lands at Windyedge with a familiar face, and what are presumed to be defectors. Another familiar face, but from the rest of the books, turns up, Everyone’s very human motivations – and the loss that Jamie and Louisa, in particular, carry with them – as well as the high stakes mean it really isn’t a game. All that as well as Wein’s clever plot make this a page turner. I wanted to devour it and was fairly frustrated that the demands of live made me have to put it aside. There are no chapters, just switches of perspective, and I longed for Jane’s POV, as she does certain unwise things that worry Louisa, and for the greater perspective of her life. Her attitude is very much that this is one last adventure for her.
The ending is both shattering and satisfying, with pay-offs for superstitions, building and changing relationships and the full, harrowing story of something only mentioned in passing in CNV. The amateurish conspirators’ time with the Enigma machine comes to an end. In the author’s note, Wein admits to fudging when it came into British hands to fit with her already existing canon, but her general meticulousness about details, such as flying a Blenheim, what it would be like for a Jamaican girl like Lousia and the realities of a Scottish winter in 1940-41 add verisimilitude.
All the characters have learned from the other, with Ellen and Louisa forging a friendship (and leaving me hoping that Ellen would one day get to see Jamaica, because her future is unknown to me, while I knew how bittersweet the next few years would be for Jamie.) Louisa had come to love Jane. Like her, the brave Felix, the stickler Cromwell and all the boys become men Jamie flew with have left their mark on the reader. And the youth of the latter really leaves an impression.
