Somebody Else's Nimrod

Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide

This was an oddly unsatisfying book. It's a memoir of the author's time as a cryptographer for British intelligence during WWII, during which he apparently pioneered (at least for his own country) some vital encryption techniques. Marks has a pleasingly self-deprecatory style--the book could have been subtitled Portrait of the Writer as a Young Blighter--and his constant awareness of the subordination of his work to that of the field agents is refreshing. The relation of his discovery through analysis of the kind of traffic alone that England's Dutch spies had almost all been captured was properly interesting and chilling. I was also intrigued by his largely throwaway references to life as a Jew during this time period, which can't have been easy.

However, as a portrait of the times, Between Silk and Cyanide suffers from the peculiarly English fault (Anthony Powell being another notable offender) of being utterly unaware that the reader may not be of the author's social milieu and hence able to fill in all blanks and look at everything in some broader view. The general effect is of examining a picture taken with the lens jammed up against one interesting detail of the subject, with absolutely no context or perspective. For a study of life in cryptography, the book avoids virtually all technical details, presumably on the grounds that the reader wouldn't get them, but that leaves the book disappointingly vague when a greater attempt to communicate Marks's craft to the layman might have made it more interesting and challenging. For a book of several hundred pages to be mostly repetitive office politics seems like a wasted opportunity.

I suppose this book will appeal to those who gobble up any and all WWII-related materials. Others are advised to skip it.