Transcription

Review pending, maybe until I reread it? I liked it but I'm not sure I got it as fully as I should have.

I so enjoyed Life After Life and found Transcription to be a bit of a let down. The characters never revealed enough of themselves for me to invest in them and I found the structure to be a bit unwieldy. There were sections that I flew through but overall I found the novel to be a bit more work than I wanted it to be.

A very sedate spy novel with exactly the sort of ending I expected from nearly the beginning. But it's very well constructed.

Transcription is a spy novel, but different from most of the spy novels I've read over the years. Juliet Armstrong, the protagonist, is drawn into working for MI5 during World War II not out of a desire to be a spy, but out of need for a job and a headmistress's recommendation to a recruiter. She goes along with what she is asked to do, and thereby ends up transcribing the conversations of British Fascists with an MI5 agent they think is an agent for Nazi Germany. In the course of doing this work, her wit, her energy and her daring are noticed, and she's asked to do other jobs as well.

The novel switches back and forth between events in 1940 when Juliet is working for MI5, and 1950 when she's working for the BBC. In 1950, her old association with MI5 intrudes on her life again and she puts her wit, energy, and daring to work to try understand what is happening. The story relies a little bit on information not revealed to the reader until the opportune time, but for the most part the reader catches on as Juliet does.

I really enjoyed Juliet herself, who is not an especially compliant female. Her responses to people were surprising at times–oppositional, sympathetic, brusque, vulnerable, but not lukewarm. She dives right into fraught situations instead of avoiding them. Despite her ambivalence about spying, I thought she was probably pretty well suited to it.

I was unsure about this book at the beginning since it seemed to have a slow start. Little did I realize that the author was carefully laying down her story piece by piece and that it would all come together in the end. The main character is smartly written and the story was satisfying in the end. I would recommend to those who enjoy literary fiction and don't mind a plot that develops slowly.

A good plot, but contains a lot of fluff. I found the character of Perry to be a disappointing caricature, and found Juliet's BBC coworkers two dimensional and unlikable. They felt undeveloped and thrown in. Atkinson writes good books, but I found this one a little disappointing compared to some of her others.

I usually like Atkinson's books and the way they play with time, and I usually enjoy WWII London books, but this one didn't do it for me. I couldn't keep track of the names, and I couldn't get interested in any of the characters. They all had too much of a stiff upper lip.

I listened to the audiobook version of this novel. Expertly narrated, making the characters far more sympathetic than my reading them on the page would have done.

One of the few books that I had to stop reading halfway (I usually take the decision to stop reading much sooner, but this time I made a mistake of hoping that it would get better). The tone is excessively light to the point of being childish, the intertwined romance is silly and the story doesn't go anywhere. Very dull.

While Kate Atkinson's “A God in Ruins” was the first of her books I didn't enjoy, I thought it was a fluke as I loved several of her other books, including the entire Jackson Brodie Series. I simply found the main character dull and never made it to her World War II activity (the whole pint of the book). Ah, well, maybe I'll try again as this novel has received a good bit of acclaim.