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Reading: Transcription
Apr. 12th, 2019 07:56 pmI was delighted last year when I saw that there was a new Kate Atkinson novel coming out - her first since A God in Ruins in 2015 - and I immediately pre-ordered it. It arrived on my Kindle in September and sat there for six months until I managed to get round to it this week (by which point I could just have bought it in paperback, really).
Like all of Atkinson's books, Transcription is about the way the past and the present interact. It begins in 1981, when sixty-year-old Juliet Armstrong is knocked down by a car in Wigmore Street after attending a concert; the final moments of Juliet's life bookend a dual narrative of her earlier life, in 1940 as a young woman working for MI5, transcribing recordings of meetings between fifth columnists and an undercover agent, and in 1950, as a producer for BBC Schools Radio, finding that her wartime experiences are returning to haunt her. The narrative alternates between the two time periods, gradually filling in the details of Juliet's wartime experience and how that relates to the things that are happening to her after the war.
It's a clever, pacy and often very funny take on a wartime spy thriller, populated by a cast of frequently unsympathetic but still vivid and somehow likeable characters. I also thought it felt very much like a novel of the Brexit era, questioning nationalism and patriotism, the character of England and the mutability of history (to say nothing of the British Fascists). As so often with Atkinson's novels, having got to the end I feel half-tempted to go back and read it from the beginning again to see how it looks now I know the overall shape; there were so many moments where I wanted to check back to remind myself of what had seemed like a throwaway detail a hundred pages ago but had assumed a suddenn sigificance that I probably would have been better off with the paperback.
Like all of Atkinson's books, Transcription is about the way the past and the present interact. It begins in 1981, when sixty-year-old Juliet Armstrong is knocked down by a car in Wigmore Street after attending a concert; the final moments of Juliet's life bookend a dual narrative of her earlier life, in 1940 as a young woman working for MI5, transcribing recordings of meetings between fifth columnists and an undercover agent, and in 1950, as a producer for BBC Schools Radio, finding that her wartime experiences are returning to haunt her. The narrative alternates between the two time periods, gradually filling in the details of Juliet's wartime experience and how that relates to the things that are happening to her after the war.
It's a clever, pacy and often very funny take on a wartime spy thriller, populated by a cast of frequently unsympathetic but still vivid and somehow likeable characters. I also thought it felt very much like a novel of the Brexit era, questioning nationalism and patriotism, the character of England and the mutability of history (to say nothing of the British Fascists). As so often with Atkinson's novels, having got to the end I feel half-tempted to go back and read it from the beginning again to see how it looks now I know the overall shape; there were so many moments where I wanted to check back to remind myself of what had seemed like a throwaway detail a hundred pages ago but had assumed a suddenn sigificance that I probably would have been better off with the paperback.
