Transcription

by Kate Atkinson

Ebook, 2018

Library's rating

Library's review

Juliet is just 17 years old when World War II roars to life in 1940. She's recruited into MI-5 but it's not as exciting as it sounds; she's a transcriptionist, typing up dictated letters and conversations. Things get marginally more interesting when she's assigned to work out of a London flat,

which happens to be located right next door to a meeting place for a group of Hitler-sympathizing British fascists. What the fascists don't know is that their flat is bugged, and their leader is an undercover British agent, seeking not so much to expose them as to contain them. It's Juliet's job to listen to the primitive recordings and transcribe them for the spy kings.

Most of the story is set during the war, but that action is bookended by two segments set in 1950, when Juliet has left MI-5 and is working for the BBC. Figures from her past begin appearing randomly — or do they? Is she paranoid, or is someone really out to get her?

I always enjoy Atkinson's writing but this one fell a little flat for me. It just seemed rather slight with a lack of action surprising in a novel about wartime espionage. Perhaps that was the point, that the mundane infects everyone and everything in ways people outside the situation cannot understand. That, and the banality of evil, maybe, as the British fascists are a motley, rather pathetic crew. Ultimately, the ending felt rushed and my general mood when I closed the book was disgruntled rather than satisfied. Better luck next time.

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Read in 2018, Read but unowned

Description

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 Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.

Media reviews

Guardian

This idea of consequences, and of every choice exacting a price later, runs like a watermark through Transcription, as it did through its two predecessors. At times, the novel is guilty of making its historical parallels a little too emphatic:... Transcription stands alongside its immediate

predecessors as a fine example of Atkinson’s mature work; an unapologetic novel of ideas, which is also wise, funny and paced like a spy thriller. While it may lack the emotional sucker punch of A God in Ruins, Transcription exerts a gentler pull on the emotions, offering at the end a glimmer of hope, even as it asks us to consider again our recent history and the price of our individual and collective choices. It could hardly be more timely.

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