Transcription

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.

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.