This is by Kate Atkinson, a British author so famous that she even features in Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, alongside other quintessentially British institutions like M&S and Battenberg.

According to Nick Duerden, "Kate Atkinson occupies rarefied airspace within British literature. Effortlessly straddling the overlap between the literary and the commercial, she’s one of the country’s most beloved novelists: her books become bestsellers simply because they are by Kate Atkinson."

And yet this, published in 2018, is my first, proving how incorrigibly unfashionable I am.

I listened to the audio-version, excellently narrated (accents, asides, and all) by Fenella Woolgar.



I came to Transciption via the same article in The Economist that took me to Stella Rimington's Secret Asset. Because, yes, at its heart, this is a spy novel.

Aged 19, and an orphan, Juliet Armstrong is recruited in 1940 to work with the Security Service, aka MI5. She starts out as a clerk in the Registry (located at Wormwood Scrubs at the time), but is then singled out by one Peregrine Gibbons (Perry, tall, "rather natty", once studied mesmerism) for a special operation. This involves listening in on fifth columnists pouring their Nazi-sympathizing, Jew-hating hearts out to the MI5's Godfrey Toby, whom they understand to be a Gestapo secret agent billeted in London. Juliet's job is to transcribe the conversations (coughs, dog barks, newspaper rustles, and all).

Such transcriptions actually exist. They were released to Britain's National Archives a few years ago, and Atkinson tells us in an afterword that they were the spark that produced the novel. The fake Gestapo agent was Eric Roberts (aka Jack King), and he's certainly interesting in his own right. But Atkinson's attention was primarily caught by the nameless person -- almost certain to be female -- who actually did the transcribing. According to the author, "glimmers of the transcriber’s personality peep out occasionally here and there in the documents", helping her imagine the character who became Juliet.


Gestapo ID card for "Jack King"


Eric Roberts

We meet Juliet at three junctures in her life. The book opens in 1981, when the 60-year-old Miss Armstrong has been hit by a car while crossing the road in London.

Then we cut to 1950, when she's working on children's programmes for BBC Radio. At that point she encounters someone she knew from her work during the war, and his refusal to acknowledge her sends her off down a labyrinth of reminiscence and recollection.

That's when we embark on the 1940 timeline. The novel continues to slide backwards and forwards across this 10-year divide. The zigzags are well done; they're never confusing; and they're full of layers of meaning. The Juliet of the 1950s, we increasingly realize, is very much the product of her 1940s persona (or, more accurately, personae).

The work of transcribing is pretty humdrum, and the products, set out almost like play-scripts, are full of queried words, incomplete sentences, and sections marked inaudible (having done transcription myself in various contexts, I know all too well what pernickety, time-consuming, frustrating work it can be).

But Juliet's war-time life is spiced up several notches when she's recruited to infiltrate fifth-column circles in the guise of "Iris Carter Jenkins". From a Girl's Own-type adventure, with invisible ink, miniature Mausers, and daring escapes down wall-clinging creeper, things turn much darker, and someone who has helped "Iris" ends up dead. Later, Juliet is required to play a part in covering up another messy outcome, and the ominous sentences that accompany that scenario haunt the narrative even before their significance is made totally clear to us.

Incidentally, the Isle of Man turns up at one point... A fascist sympathizer's maid is interned there.

Juliet is an interesting character. On the one hand, she's curiously naive, lending story-book wings to her crush on Perry without at all realizing that he's fairly obviously gay. On the other hand, she's no innocent rose. She has a talent for deception; she lies easily and instinctively; she steals when the opportunity arises. And she has a curious habit of ironic internal monologue, interrogating idiomatic expressions, and querying everyday vocabulary. After one bout of this, we're told: "Juliet sighed and wondered if one day she would think herself to death." This habit is amusing (or at least starts out that way), but it's also distinctly distancing. There's no way you'll ever get close to this character. And that, of course, is part of the point.

In the 1950s timeline, we learn that the Security Service still employs Juliet from time to time. She provides a night's accommodation, for example, for a fugitive from the communist bloc who is being spirited off to the United States. He is codenamed Flamingo.



With all this past and present covert activity, it doesn't come as a total surprise when BBC Juliet starts receiving anonymous threats, and becoming aware of mysterious personages. She goes in search of some of the characters from her early days, seeking indications of possible vengeance, but she increasingly finds it difficult to separate truth from artifice. Some other powers are clearly pulling strings around her, and they don't identify themselves until right at the end (when they give us unexpected information about Juliet's role as well).

As Lisa Allardice points out, "there is something unusually stagey about Transcription". All the references to plays and films and acting; the constant suggestion that "everyone is playing a role, and probably not just one"; the asides and stage whispers; the self-conscious references to invention ("Come now, quite enough of exposition and explanation. We’re not approaching the end of a novel, Miss Armstrong"); the thin line between tragedy and farce -- it's all irrepressibly theatrical.

Is this why I wasn't quite sure how to evaluate it? I enjoyed it. It was suspenseful, quite gripping in places. It was amusing. It was also informative. The conversations sound very authentic (think Howard or Wesley).

But there is arguably too much going on. The BBC material, for example, which is both interesting and funny, gets drowned out by the spy-related plot points. It feels as though there are actually two novels in here.


The front end of the BBC's new Broadcasting House. BBC Monitoring (in the picture at the top) was created in 1939, and was located at Caversham Park, near Reading, from 1943 to 2018

Adrian Van Young's review perceptively skewers two elements that become slightly irritating: "Juliet’s third-person limited close POV ... is never not inflected by a kind of hyper-educated sardonicism that seems like it’s Juliet’s most of the time, but could just as well be Atkinson’s in Juliet-clothing. And then there’s those parenthetical reaction shots, ubiquitous throughout the novel, that clutter and over-stretch Atkinson’s syntax. In the first half of the novel, which mostly spans the first of two 1940 timelines, these asides could be said to represent what Juliet knows to be true, but cannot say -- as a recent initiate into the workings of MI5, as a professional woman caught in the matrix of World War II–era British patriarchal culture. In its latter half, however, the parentheticals become merely annoying, sidetracking the reader in the midst of charting subtle shifts in Juliet’s evolution as a character, which grows markedly less distinct as Transcription plods forward, or interrupting dramatic denouements. At last, these interjections come to represent not what Juliet, but Atkinson, can’t resist saying, even if only to herself."

This is perhaps a little harsh, but it's true that the self-deprecatory and self-interrogatory style does sometimes teeter on the brink of seeming overly arch.

Some commentators complain that the big reveal came as too much of a surprise. I don't think that's fair. What we're clearly shown about Juliet all the way through is that we know very little about Juliet... She's a mystery even to herself. Lying half-conscious after the accident (or whatever it was) that opens the book, she thinks: "It had probably been a long enough life... Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to somebody else."

But, of course, that lack of clarity does make it difficult for us to engage with her. Jennifer Egan comments: "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... Juliet’s opacity may be part of Atkinson’s strategy... But a good agent can prove a frustrating protagonist."

A good point on which to close. But my mild reservations wouldn't stop my pursuing Kate Atkinson over another couple of titles.


Illustration by Hannah K. Lee