BRAIN LABOR

By John Skow

OF ALL HUMAN CONDITIONS--love, rage, fear, madness and the rest of the ragbag--the hardest for an actor or a writer of fiction to counterfeit is genius. Merely reminding us won't work, because we haven't been there. Is genius simply a powerful flow of really good ideas? Doesn't help; we don't know where even moderately good ideas come from. Robert Harris, whose chilling novel Fatherland imagined what Europe might have been like had World War II stalled out in an English defeat and a U.S. withdrawal, makes a brave try at construing genius, the light bulb over the unicorn's head, in his new novel, Enigma (Random House; 320 pages; $23). The results are worthy and believable, if not luminous.

His subjects are the British code breakers who with rarefied intelligence and brain-fogging labor broke the German Enigma code in March 1943. Their feat, which helped turn the war at a very dark midpoint, allowed the reading of coded messages to and from German submarine wolf packs. The subs, whose attacks on U.S. freighter convoys in the North Atlantic were starving Britain, could then be tracked and sunk.

Harris takes for his hero a neurasthenic mathematician named Tom Jericho, frail, distracted, fluky even by the measure of other code breakers at Bletchley, a town west of Cambridge where the secret intelligence unit has its warren. As the drama starts, Jericho has been furloughed from Bletchley because of instability, but is brought back again because his eerily acute mind is needed even if it is haunted and unraveling. Subplots involve a forlorn love interest and the burrowings of a suspected mole, but the real story, and a good one, is whether Jericho can track Enigma through the deep space of his own brain before he melts to ash. Great mathematical ability remains a snark that can't really be hunted in a novel, but the author provides what is possible, the illusion of understanding as an unearthly mind reaches for patterns in a mist of numbers.