Kate Atkinson's Transcription

'Transcription,' Kate Atkinson's latest stand-alone novel, follows eighteen-year-old Juliet Armstrong, who is recruited straight out of school by MI5 in 1940, not long after her mother dies. Initially assigned secretarial duties as well as roles traditionally assigned to women, such as making tea, she soon begins transcription work monitoring conversations held in a Pimlico flat between Fascist sympathisers and an undercover British agent named Godfrey Toby, who poses as a member of the Gestapo. A decade later, she is working as a BBC radio producer of children's program, believing that her wartime activities have passed her by. A chance meeting with Godfrey, some threatening notes, and a sense that she is being followed remind her that the world of espionage is not one easily left behind, and there are those who want Juliet to know that her actions have far-reaching consequences.
 
The story begins in 1981, when Juliet is hit by a car in London, and jumps back and forth between 1940 and 1950. Historical fiction can become bogged down in detail, but Atkinson's prose is nimble in its quirkiness, and she and her characters don't waste time dwelling on the larger context of the war. Juliet's transcription work is mostly routine and mundane at first, as she attempts to decipher a lot of silent whispering, before progressing to more dangerous operations in order to infiltrate networks more directly. Although Juliet appears to be a rather foolish character at times, she also turns out to be a wry observer of the world, making it difficult to determine how much she truly knows, to the point where she becomes almost as mysterious as her handlers.

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'Transcription' contains many of Atkinson's trademark strengths, including a non-chronological structure, dry humor, and a lightly drawn but no less compelling mid-twentieth-century setting.

Her perceptive take on family dynamics is much less prominent in 'Transcription,' but the careful plotting and numerous red herrings that lead up to the twist at the end indicate that her unique style of detective fiction is also well suited to the betrayals and multiple identities associated with wartime espionage.






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