Book read, July
Feb. 21st, 2019 10:28 amI read one book in July, partly because I was writing Dragon Rising but mostly because it was an absolutely fantastic book (thanks so much to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sovay for the rec) and nothing else really matched up. I’m still thinking about it.
Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s Story, by Leo Marks
Leo Marks’ father was Benjamin Marks, owner of the Marks & Co. antiquarian bookshop that features in (and at) 84, Charing Cross Road, and the first code Leo cracked was the price code his father used for the books. At 22 he was recruited into SOE and became the codes & ciphers chief. This book is a record of his time there; it’s stunningly well-written, bristling with intelligence and determination, as Marks battles to protect his agents by giving them the best and least breakable codes (the ultimate explanation of the title). He also reworks the coding department, training up FANYs to break the “Undecipherables” that accounted for so many transmissions, secretly cracking the Free French code so he can fix their undecipherables, and composing poems - sometimes scatological, sometimes heartbreaking - that the agents can use as keys that, unlike the previously used extant poems, could not simply be found by Nazis browsing through English poetry anthologies.
The average lifespan of a radio operator in Occupied France was about six weeks so many of the agents he briefed & trained were going to their deaths, and he doesn't shy away from this. Nor did he treat a known double agent any differently when he briefed him, despite knowing that the man would be executed en route to Occupied France and his body shoved out attached to a half-opened parachute, with misleading codes in his pockets. Much of the book is about his (correct) conviction that the resistance operating in the Netherlands had been taken over by the Germans, and his attempts to convince his superiors. Also in there are his friendships with the agents, his own (very briefly described) doomed romance, and a keenly ironic sense of humour (there are some particularly nice pieces relating to his fondness for swinging from ring to ring over the local swimming pool - this was obviously a thing as E.F. Benson's David Blaize does this in David at Kings, although Marks, who thrives on danger, does it fully clothed).
And fabulous writing. I think it's impossible to overstate this. It's also the first nonfiction book I've read by a Jewish person relating to WWII that doesn't spend any time with them being actively persecuted by the Nazis (Maddie in Code Name Verity is, I think, the only fictional one I've encountered). I read the library's copy but will be ordering my own.
sovay for the rec) and nothing else really matched up. I’m still thinking about it.Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s Story, by Leo Marks
Leo Marks’ father was Benjamin Marks, owner of the Marks & Co. antiquarian bookshop that features in (and at) 84, Charing Cross Road, and the first code Leo cracked was the price code his father used for the books. At 22 he was recruited into SOE and became the codes & ciphers chief. This book is a record of his time there; it’s stunningly well-written, bristling with intelligence and determination, as Marks battles to protect his agents by giving them the best and least breakable codes (the ultimate explanation of the title). He also reworks the coding department, training up FANYs to break the “Undecipherables” that accounted for so many transmissions, secretly cracking the Free French code so he can fix their undecipherables, and composing poems - sometimes scatological, sometimes heartbreaking - that the agents can use as keys that, unlike the previously used extant poems, could not simply be found by Nazis browsing through English poetry anthologies.
The average lifespan of a radio operator in Occupied France was about six weeks so many of the agents he briefed & trained were going to their deaths, and he doesn't shy away from this. Nor did he treat a known double agent any differently when he briefed him, despite knowing that the man would be executed en route to Occupied France and his body shoved out attached to a half-opened parachute, with misleading codes in his pockets. Much of the book is about his (correct) conviction that the resistance operating in the Netherlands had been taken over by the Germans, and his attempts to convince his superiors. Also in there are his friendships with the agents, his own (very briefly described) doomed romance, and a keenly ironic sense of humour (there are some particularly nice pieces relating to his fondness for swinging from ring to ring over the local swimming pool - this was obviously a thing as E.F. Benson's David Blaize does this in David at Kings, although Marks, who thrives on danger, does it fully clothed).
And fabulous writing. I think it's impossible to overstate this. It's also the first nonfiction book I've read by a Jewish person relating to WWII that doesn't spend any time with them being actively persecuted by the Nazis (Maddie in Code Name Verity is, I think, the only fictional one I've encountered). I read the library's copy but will be ordering my own.
