Transcription, by Kate Atkinson.
London, 1940.
Eighteen year-old Juliet Armstrong is an orphan following the recent
death of her beloved mother.
Fortunately, she has been raised to be resourceful and self-reliant, and
her mother worked hard to provide her with the best education that she and
various scholarships could achieve.
Now Juliet is alone, but has landed herself a job –
albeit a menial one – with a branch of MI5:
she will be transcribing secret recordings of the meetings of Hitler
sympathisers and Fifth Columnists in an adjoining flat;
those who admire the Third
Reich and think it only a matter of time before England is invaded by the
triumphant German Army. Imagine them
goose-stepping along the Mall: what an
uplifting sight!
The clandestine meetings are conducted by Godfrey Toby,
an MI5 operative posing as a Gestapo agent, and the darling of the little cabal
of traitors who meet with him for tea and biscuits, imparting snippets of news
of troop movements, industrial build-ups, and any gossip they may hear or can
contribute to that may sow seeds of rebellion and dissent: they are the Nazi version of the French
Underground, and Juliet would find their treachery (artfully orchestrated by
Godfrey) quite shocking – if only it weren’t so pedestrian, and frequently interrupted by a barking dog, for traitor
#3? 4? Dolly always brings her dog Dibs
along, and he seems to have as much to say in his little canine way, as the
other plotters. It is very hard to
transcribe secrets when a lot of what she types is ‘conversation inaudible. Dog barking.’
Life starts looking up, however, when her shadowy bosses
decide that (apart from continuing her daytime transcription duties – ‘it
doesn’t matter when you type them,
just as long as they are done.’) she
is now ready for some field work:
because of her fresh prettiness and higher education, she may be able to
penetrate the upper echelons of society to provide evidence of Far Right
thinking amongst the Aristocracy. Surely
not! The Great and the Good could never
harbour such vipers to their bosoms.
Could they?
They could, and no-one is more horrified than Juliet to
discover that various pillars of the Establishment are not marble, but
crumbling clay. And who spies on the
Spies? It becomes impossible to know
which side her most trusted colleagues are on, as evidence mounts of betrayal
in the most unlikely places.
Prize-winning author Kate Atkinson takes the reader on a
heady ride through twentieth-century wartime history, shifting the action via
flashback through a forty-year period.
Her characters are ordinary, flawed but always appealing and, as we
expect with a writer of Ms Atkinson’s calibre, a rich vein of humour is
threaded throughout, thanks to Juliet, who is singular and unforgettable. There’s a twist to the tale, too, that I
never saw coming: that Juliet – who
would have thought! FIVE STARS.
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