Questions?
Enigma
Based on chapter 1.
Essay 3
Dealing with how the actual history of World War II is portrayed in the novel.
See handout for details.
Plot
What’s happening and who’s who?
Jericho: civilian code breaker from Bletchley Park, sent to Cambridge University (Kings College) to work while recovering from a nervous breakdown.
Claire: Jericho’s (ex) love interest.
Guy Logie: Jericho’s boss.
Leveret: The muscle.
Kings College servants speculate a lot about who Jericho really is and what he does; we (readers) know quite a bit about this via flashbacks to the events leading up to Jericho’s breakdown at Bletchley.
Historical Context
What do you know about the actual history against which this novel is set?
- World War II
- The British are cracking the Enigma code
- Enigma was a secure German military code.
- Broken with varying degrees of success from the beginning of the war, thanks to “bombe” machines that tried possible keys faster than people could.
- Enigma consisted of a typewriter keyboard for entering text and lights for displaying it, with a set of wheels in between that mapped electrical signals representing letters from the keyboard to signals representing other letters for the lights - this provided a simple substitution cipher. What made Enigma much harder to break than the substitution ciphers we worked with is that after every letter the wheels turned in an odometer-like manner, so that each letter was enciphered with a different substitution.
- An Enigma key was basically which wheels to put into the machine and what position to start them at.
- Enigma was designed so that to decipher with it, you set your machine up with the same key the message had been sent with, then typed the ciphertext on the keyboard, and the plaintext appeared on the lights.
Keep an eye on social history, e.g., women’s role in Bletchley Park & workplace, in the novel too.
Next
The research process and forming a research question.
Do the “Why Is Research Important?” and “Preliminary Research Strategies” units in INTD 106 (part of Module 6).
Read chapters 2 and 3 of Enigma.