Book Report: Transcription

28. Kate Atkinson, Transcription (2018) (10/9/18)

I have never read Kate Atkinson before, but I've heard great things about her, so I was eager to dive into her newest release. Set in 1940 and 1950 (and very briefly in 1981), the story concerns Juliet Armstrong, who transcribes conversations between an MI5 operative, Godfrey Toby, and "Fifth Columnists," or Fascist sympathizers, during WWII—and by 1950 has moved on to produce children's radio shows for the BBC. Juliet gets called on to do a bit of spy work herself—in more ways than one.

I very much enjoyed Atkinson's writing, which is witty and sardonic (if overly given to parenthetical asides), and overall literary. The story is replete with characters, which occasionally confused me (wait, just who was Hartley again?). There's a juicy murder and circumspect burial. Secrets are traded. At one point Juliet feels like she's being followed, with elaborate ruses put in place to make her believe a certain version of reality. There are, of course, transcriptions. And Juliet, it turns out, is a highly accomplished liar—not in a malicious way; more in a smoothing-over way. But deceit comes in handy in the spycraft line of work. It all amounts to a pretty good espionage thriller, though I have to say that in the end the final twists came too fast and furious and the whole thing seemed to unravel. I couldn't help but wonder if Atkinson was trying to be a tad too clever, and what could have been solid, historically based storytelling began to veer into farce.

In one very funny episode early on—to give you a sample of Atkinson's style—Juliet accompanies her boss, Peregrine Gibbons (on whom she has wistful designs), out of London for a miserable stroll through the countryside.

He had binoculars with him and she wondered if he was looking for anything in particular.
 "Kites," he said. "They're long gone from this part of the world and I don't suppose we'll see them again, but you can live in hope." Kites? Did he mean birds? First [otter] kits, now kites. Her mind ran on to Kit Kats, a thought that made her immeasurably sad, as she knew there were going to be none.
 He cupped his ear and said, "Can you hear that woodpecker?"
 "That" (annoying) "knocking sound?"
 Juliet knew nothing about birds. She could manage the common ones—pigeons, sparrows, and so on—but her ornithology didn't extend beyond the streets of London. She was a complete philistine where wildlife was concerned. Perry, on the other hand, was a nature enthusiast. He didn't find kites, but he spotted and named an awful lot of other birds. An awful lot.
 "You need a good memory in our line of work," he said. But she wasn't going to be identifying birds, was she? (Was she?) "Look," he whispered, crouching and pulling her down with him. "Hares—boxing. It's the female who throws the punches. Wonderful!"
 Any romantic notions she may have been fostering had been entirely numbed by cold and hunger. He was currently expounding on the regurgitating habits of owls. "Fur and bone of voles and mice," he said, and she thought of the witches in Macbeth and she laughed and responded with " 'Eye of newt and toe of frog.' "
 "Well, yes," he said, perplexed by the allusion. "Frogs—and rats—are occasionally found in their pellets. Shrews are common. You can identify the different species by their jawbones." He had no Shakespeare, she realized.
 He strode ahead of her and she had to go almost at a trot to keep up with him, trailing on his heels like a dutiful retriever. A nippy breeze had got up now and started to carry away his words and she missed a lot of information about the breeding habits of roe deer and the architecture of rabbit warrens. She thought longingly of the driver's neat white sandwich triangles. 

Indeed, I found the conversations especially delightful, with the characters so often at cross-purposes, or with decidedly different grasps of reality. Apparently Atkinson is also keen on structure (as discussed in this New York Times podcast, which I have yet to listen to), as the hopping around in time—not just between 1940 and 1950, but back and forth within a particular year, or even week—suggests. And she freely admits that truth is greatly amended by invention. As she states in an "Author's Note," "Roughly speaking, for everything that could be considered a historical fact in this book, I made something up—and I'd like to think that a lot of the time readers won't be able to tell the difference. I'm only stating this to prevent people claiming that I got something wrong. I got a lot of it wrong, on purpose."

Now I'm interested to read some of Atkinson's other books. Starting, I believe, with her Whitbread Prize winner, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Might as well begin at the beginning.

P.S. When I did listen to the podcast mentioned above, Atkinson chose to read aloud the section immediately before the sample I offer, which launches their little countryside jaunt. I love it that she considers that passage as representative or telling as I did. She said she chose to read it because it introduces Juliet well, and it epitomizes the lack of communication that, in a way, characterizes so much of the book.