Enigma's Coda - Mike King - Bog

Are you now, or have you ever been, Alan Turing?

Professor William Strange has a stellar academic career, beautiful house, wife and baby son, all of which is imperilled by his affair with the enigmatic Adriana Russett. He is convinced that she is the clue to strange dreams of the 1940s which jumble up the life of Alan Turing and a mission in which a flying boat sinks a German submarine. Was he the great mathematician in a previous life? His breakdown is somehow presaged by two major public events, the death of Princess Diana and the 9/11 attacks. But does any of this justify his affair?

Enigma's Coda is a Two Cultures campus novel which juxtaposes the 2010s with the 1940s, exploring the very different assumptions of ordinary people in those eras regarding progress, sexuality and conflict. It is also about Englishness and class, referencing such classics as The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and Brief Encounter, and more recent novels such as Ian McEwan's Solar and David Lodge's Thinks.... The reader is left to muse on whether or not reincarnation is real and a determinant in obsessive sexual entanglements.