Arena

This is a silly novel which exploits the Bletchley Park myth. Lucy Ribchester writes lucidly and has done plenty of research into Bletchley, but that story of intercepts and potential for espionage has been twisted and turned so many times that she strains to maximise her research and has to concoct an increasingly silly plot to get more out of the subject. There are just too many red herrings, together with a surfeit of possible definitive explanations -- for instance that Honey Deschamps may be re-living a Hitchcock film for Ribchester to manage them to a plausible conclusion. Spy-novel clichés damage more interesting efforts to lean towards a social history of Bletchley Park and its female employees. Near the end, once the plot is unravelled, there is an almost guilty attempt to reassert and respect the underlying activities of Bletchley Park but even that and the switch into a symbolic mode near the end only confirm that this is a misguided project.