A dramatic story of WWII espionage, betrayal, and loyalty, by the #1 bestselling author of Life After Life In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British ...
Kate Atkinson’s novel Transcription is the answer to the question of what happens if you take the wicked humor of Martin Amis, John Le Carre prose elegance and the emotional honesty of Iris Murdoch and blend them all together.
Transcription tells the story of Juliet Armstrong in two periods of her life: during World War II and in the 1950’s.
Juliet is a compelling protagonist, winning you over with her witty retorts and hilariously devastating inner monologue while navigating absurd situations caused mostly by often inept men and their spy games. During World War II she has been pulled into the war effort working as a transcriber of audio recordings of British Nazis. In the 1950’s we find her employed as a producer of children radio programs at the BBC. In both settings Atkinson aptly captures the work environments, the camaraderie that forms, the incompetence of superiors with their “my girl” sexism.
The BBC producer period is of course lower stakes than the WWII life and death situations but lucky for us readers, wounds from Juliet’s spying past resurface and demand to be resolved. The plot is engaging but not overheated so you can still enjoy the writing which is excellent without fighting the urge to skip ahead just to find out what happened. Atkinson keeps you guessing by alternating between the two periods in Juliet’s life, leaving traces in the earlier period that get explained and resolved in the later period. She also does it with shorter timeframes, first describing a situation and then revealing its meaning. This is done very skillfully, you always feel you’re in good hands.
Atkinson doesn’t shy away from the underlying sadness of the tragedy of the war, all the unfulfilled potential, lives cut short. There is attention to detail for even the most minor characters and you care for them all. The fate of Fräulein Rosenfeld’s four sisters is just one small example:
“She had shown Juliet a photograph: five pretty girls enjoying a picnic long ago. White dresses, big white ribbons in their long dark hair. ‘My sisters,’ Fräulein Rosenfeld said. ‘I’m in the middle – there.’ She pointed shyly to the least pretty of the five. ‘I was the eldest.”
Despite what one of the characters says:
“Come now, quite enough of exposition and explanation. We’re not approaching the end of a novel, Miss Armstrong.”
one eventually does reach the end of this masterful spy novel and it is hard to say good bye to Juliet Armstrong and the rest of the characters. Luckily Atkinson is a very productive writer and there are plenty more of her books to read. I will gladly mine this rich gold vein.