Review by New York Times Review
ALL NOVELS ARE SPY NOVELS, Ian McEwan once observed, and it's a reasonable claim: Fiction nearly always relies on a clever observer to pry inside the minds and lives of its characters, to lay bare for the reader their deep motivations and intimate secrets. No wonder spies, like detectives, seem inherently literary figures, whether they're real, invented or - as with the spies in Kate Atkinson's intriguing new novel - a bit of both. The spying in "Transcription" happens under the aegis of MI5, the British intelligence agency whose elite affiliations and Cold War defections are well known. Atkinson plumbs a more obscure realm of MI5's activity: its infiltration, during World War II, of the so-called fifth column, a network of British Nazi sympathizers who revered Hitler and eagerly awaited Germany's conquest of Europe. In an afterword, Atkinson explains that the sort of covert operation she has dramatized actually did take place. A British MI5 agent, posing as an agent of Nazi Germany, hosted regular meetings for fifth-column members in a London apartment wired with microphones. In an adjacent apartment, MI5 agents recorded their conversations. Into these dramatic environs Atkinson injects one Juliet Armstrong, the "girl" (as in: "I need a girl") selected by MI5 to transcribe the secretly recorded dialogues. "Transcription" visits Juliet at three periods of her life, which are nested like Russian dolls. At the outset, "just 60 years old," she is struck by a car and knows she will die; two pages later, we meet her at 28, working for the BBC in 1950, a time when London (and virtually everyone in it) was still hobbled by the war. Fans of "Life After Life," Atkinson's 2013 masterpiece, will recognize the artful pathos with which she renders the war's cratering effect on Londoners. But what interests Atkinson here is less the war's aftermath than its simmering persistence. On the street during her lunch break, Juliet spots a man, Godfrey Toby, with whom she worked very closely back in 1940. But when she rushes up to greet him, he denies his identity, insisting she has mistaken him for someone else and leaving her shaken. The novel then turns to 1940, when Juliet -18, orphaned, given to sassy parenthetical observations - first joins MI5. Here the narrative really takes off; watching through Juliet's irreverent eyes as MI5 recruits upper-class "girls" for possible spy work is fascinating and deliciously comic. "Pa's a duke," one drawls when Juliet notices a gold crest on her cigarettes. The amusement continues when Juliet is chosen ("plucked," as the duke's daughter puts it) to transcribe the fifth columnists' recorded conversations from the apartment next door. Atkinson marvelously captures the sheltered, insouciant Juliet's longing for experience: "Her education sexuelle (it was easier to think of it as something French) was woefully riddled with lacunae. They had drawn diagrams to show the domestic plumbing system at school in Housecraft. It was a pointless subject - how to lay a tea tray, what to feed an invalid, what to look for when buying meat (beef should be 'marbled with fat'). How much more useful if they had taught you about sex." Her wish for erotic transport settles on her boss, the enigmatic Peregrine Gibbons, who eventually invites her on a promising excursion to the country. The ensuing hilarity is best captured in the following couplet: "'Otters,' he whispered, spreading a tarpaulin sheet on the riverbank. "'Sir?' Had he said otters? Not seduction then." Atkinson's use of comedy in the first half of the novel is unexpected and inspired; even the Dada-esque chunks of Juliet's transcription are animated by our awareness of her exasperated confusion as she types them. When she is assigned her own false identity and charged with befriending a middle-aged woman who is a Nazi sympathizer, the humor tilts toward the madcap; Juliet is, at best, a sloppy and capricious spy. When a dead body turns up, it would appear to signal a change of tone, and the 1940 action stops just short, we're told, of "the horror of what happened next." When "Transcription" shifts back to 1950, we find Juliet still partly in the employ of MI5; she has agreed - apparently not for the first time - to let her apartment be used as a safe house, in this case an overnight stay for a refugee scientist fleeing the Communist bloc. The resulting debacle is one of several new plots Atkinson sets in motion halfway through the novel: a snafu at the BBC program Juliet works on; an anonymous threat delivered to her at work; an odd-looking man and woman who seem to be following her; her own attempts to locate Godfrey Toby, whose path she crossed at the start; and her decision to track down the remaining fifth columnists whose conversations she transcribed to see whether any might be plotting revenge. The overburdened narrative loses focus, and the undisclosed "horror" from 1940 asserts itself as a leitmotif in the form of ominous dialogue snippets - "We've had rather a shock" and "We must finish her off," among others - that float through the text. As a strategy for sustaining tension, this is risky; the horrifying event, when at last divulged, is almost inevitably less horrifying than the reader has come to expect. The deeper problem in the last half of "Transcription" lies with Juliet. Beguiling as an excitable ingenue, she becomes cipherlike as the book progresses. Her actions seem unintelligible at times, her plucky asides almost perversely frivolous in the face of serious events. Asked to clean up after a scene of bloody violence she herself has caused, Juliet reflects: "Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up.... I expect Jesus came out of the tomb ... and said to his mother, 'Can you tidy it up a bit back there?"' Her inner life feels shrouded; without it, the novel lacks an emotional core that might have unified its ungainly plot. When asked whether she ever despairs, Juliet's instinct is to equivocate. "Hardly ever. Occasionally. Quite often," she thinks. "No, not at all," she replies aloud. What's the truth? The reader has no more idea than her interlocutor. Atkinson is keeping a secret about Juliet, and its revelation comes as a major surprise toward the end of the novel. Juliet's opacity may be part of Atkinson's strategy. Spies, after all, are notoriously hard to read - it's part of the job description. "The mark of a good agent is when you have no idea which side they're on," Juliet is advised by her boss. But a good agent can prove a frustrating protagonist; a spy may require a second spy to make her spill her secrets. Kate Atkinson is less interested in wars aftermath them in its simmering persistence.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As in her sublime Life after Life (2013), Atkinson again jumps between different periods in the mid-twentieth century to tell the story of a singular Englishwoman trapped in the vice of history. In 1940, during the phony war, 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is a well-read, if somewhat naive, young woman, more concerned with the introduction of meat rationing than with the coming of the real war, the one where you might be killed. Even her work, transcribing conversations between an MI5 agent and various fifth columnists, seems oddly unthreatening, given the dim-witted ordinariness of these comically British would-be traitors, obsessed with their numerous biscuit breaks. But then, suddenly, it doesn't seem ordinary anymore. What happens in 1940 to change Juliet's view of the world is revealed gradually, as Atkinson jumps from wartime London to 1950 and Juliet's postwar life as a radio producer for the BBC. Often, when writers attempt to tell two related but different stories, the reader picks a favorite and loses interest in the other. That's never the case here. Atkinson is a masterful narrative strategist, linking her two stories by the appearance in Juliet's postwar world of figures from her MI5 days and the suggestion that she is now at risk for what happened then. This is a novel full of surprises Juliet is far more complex than she seems at first but also one full of indelible characters, both at MI5 and the BBC, as Atkinson never fails to take us beyond an individual's circumstances to the achingly human, often-contradictory impulses within. And, as all of Atkinson's readers know, she is an exquisite writer of prose, using language with startling precision whether she is plumbing an inner life, describing events of appalling violence, or displaying her characters' wonderfully acerbic wit. Evoking such different but equally memorable works as Graham Greene's The Human Factor (1978) and Margaret Drabble's The Middle Ground (1980), this is a wonderful novel about making choices, failing to make them, and living, with some degree of grace, the lives our choices determine for us.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Atkinson's suspenseful novel (following A God in Ruins) is enlivened by its heroine's witty, sardonic voice as she is transformed from an innocent, unsophisticated young woman into a spy for Britain's MI5 during WWII. Initially recruited to transcribe secretly recorded conversations between British fascist sympathizers who think they are conspiring with the Gestapo, Juliet Armstrong is one day given an infiltration assignment (and a gun), during which she discovers an important document-and just like that, she becomes an undercover agent. Her growing realization of the serious nature of what at first seems like an "espionage lark" is made more intriguing by her attraction to her enigmatic boss. Juliet finds herself running a safe house for a Russian defector until the war's end, after which she lives in an unspecified location abroad for decades. It's in the 1970s that agents return and insist that she get back in the game as a double agent, and she realizes there's no exit. If Atkinson initially challenges credibility because Juliet slides too quickly from being a naive 18-year-old into a clever escape artist and cool conspirator, her transition into idealistic patriot and then ultimately jaded pawn in the espionage world is altogether believable. The novel's central irony is that the desperation for victory in a noble cause later becomes tainted with ruthless political chicanery. The book ends on an uncertain note for Juliet, a poignant denouement for this transportive, wholly realized historical novel. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Is it ever possible to transcend the choices of the past? In this superb new novel from Atkinson (A God in Ruins), it's 1940 when Juliet Armstrong is recruited into the British intelligence service, MI5. She supports an operation by transcribing recorded meetings between a British agent, posing as a member of the Gestapo, and British Nazi sympathizers. At 19 and somewhat naïve but with considerable wit and intelligence, she is soon entangled in espionage, undertaking an active role in the operation and bringing several traitors to justice. When the war ends, Juliet leaves MI5 for the BBC, first in Manchester, and then in London, where she produces programs for the emerging schools educational service in 1950. As Juliet's life tantalizingly unfolds, it becomes apparent that she has made some very provocative choices during the war, and that absolutely nothing is as it seems. VERDICT With a fascinating cast of characters, careful plotting, and lyrical language in turns comical and tragic, Atkinson's complex story carefully unveils the outer demands and inner conflicts that war inflicts on people. A delight for fans of A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]-Penelope J.M. Klein, Fayetteville, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The author of A God in Ruins (2015) and Life After Life (2013) revisits the Second World War.Juliet Armstrong is 18 years old and all alone in the world when she's recruited by MI5. Her job is transcribing meetings of British citizens sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Soon, she's pulled even deeper into the world of espionage, a world she will ultimately discover is hard to escapeeven after she leaves the intelligence service to produce radio programs for the BBC. Atkinson is a careful author, and the title she's chosen for this novel is more than a description of Juliet's contribution to the war effort. The concept of writing over or acrossmeanings available from the Latin roots that make up the word "transcribe"runs through the book. For example, the British Fascists who think they're passing secrets to the Third Reich are actually giving them to an English spy; their crimes are both deadly serious and parodic. At the BBC, Juliet creates programming about the past for children, versions of history that rely more on nostalgia than fact. She knows she's creating an idea of England, a scrim to hang over bombed-out buildings and dead bodies. Just as Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels borrow from mystery but exist in a category apart from that genre, her latest is a sort of demystified thriller. There is intrigue. There are surprises. But the unknowns aren't always what we think they are. The deepest pleasure here, though, is the author's language. As ever, Atkinson is sharp, precise, and funny. She might be the best Anglophone author working when it comes to adverbs. Consider this exchange: "Trude suddenly declared vehemently, Let's hope the Germans bomb us the way they bombed Rotterdam.' Goodness, why?' Mrs Scaife asked, rather taken aback by the savagery of this outburst. Because then the cowards in government will capitulate and make peace with the Third Reich.' Do have a scone,' Mrs Scaife said appeasingly."Another beautifully crafted book from an author of great intelligence and empathy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
