Juliet Armstrong works with MI5 during WWII, first simply (and rather boringly) transcribing recordings of conversations among Nazi sympathizers. But it's not long before the world of espionage engulfs her and she is asked to do much more.

I found myself struggling to get through this. The majority of it was just so dull, with what felt like a lot of rambling. Not badly written, just not captivating. It wasn't until about half way through that things picked up and became much more interesting. I still wasn't hugely invested in the characters, but the plot at least picked up. Or at least, I thought it did, and then the WWII story line abruptly ended and jumped forward, which I was expecting at some point, since I knew it was a dual time period plot, but moving forward in the timeline meant the plot slowed down again. There was another peak in the story line at the end, but I'm still not sure all the dribble in between was worth it.

There were some things I really like about this like the writing style and the periodic witty and dry quips in the narrative. And in some ways I think this could actually make an interesting movie (slow paced, granted), but I felt like much of it was just tedious.

Advanced review copy from publisher via NetGalley. My opinions are my own.

WONDERFUL! I really loved this and enjoyed reading this electronic galley from Netgalley. This is the kind of book that I wil lpretty much drop everything else I'm reading to focus on. Juliet is now one of my most favorite characters ever! Brave, smart, cheeky and independent. The storyline jumps from England in WW2 to post war England. Atkinson is so clever and her characters leap from the page. Intrigue and spies, everyone here is unreliable! The story is super compelling and fun. Don’t miss Atkinson’s afterword either. I can’t wait to recommend this to my customers!

The storyline bounces between 1940 and 1950 and kept me interested in both. But, a scary read in that the protag, Julia, makes reference to remembering when Hitler had seemed harmless. A clown. Hitting rather close to homebtoday, methinks.
Everything we have grown to expect from Ms. Atkinson.

Atkinson returns to WWII again for her newest novel but it is not a sequel to her wonderful A God in Ruins book. In this one, 18 year old Juliet is hired to be be a spy for MI-5 but not a glamorous one. She sits in a small apartment transcribing conversations of British citizens who think they are reporting to a German spy. They are traitors but on such a small scale that it is almost laughable.

The story flashes between 1940 and her activities and 1950 where she has become the producer of dull BBC stories for schoolkids. It is alarming for her when some of the people she worked with in the 40's start making appearances in her new life. They don't deal directly with her and, at times, deny they know her. The juxtaposition of the two time periods keeps the story taut and tantalizing.

Atkinson admits she made up most of the history but her research is so good that you never know which are real facts and which are fiction. It is irrelevant because the points she is making are the one that are important. It is alarming how much rings true to our political situation today. Two points that really stood out to me are:

Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (“The clowns are the dangerous ones, Perry said.”)
and
Do not equate nationalism with patriotism…Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.

Now who does that sound like? It's chilling.

This book cries out for a discussion. I would love to sit down with a group of friends discussing this book. It is a book that was meant to be talked about and shared. I would love to know what others thought about several of Juliet's kinks. I can't wait until there is a group discussion I can join.

Thanks to Net Galley for a copy of the is book in exchange for a fair review.

I loved Life After Life and unfortunately none of Kate Atkinson’s books since then measure up. This just wasn’t compelling enough to draw me in, it read like a cheesy spoof on a spy movie.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum is one of my favorite novels, so I was eager to read the newest book by Kate Atkinson. The setting of this work of historical fiction is primarily during WWII, and the subject matter is the work of a network of English spies attempting to learn information from members of the fifth column. The main character is a young woman who transcribes these conversations.

It’s always interesting for me to read stories of WWII, and this one was no exception. Atkinson moves the action quickly and somehow manages to insert humor into this serious subject. I am always grateful to learn a bit more about this fascinating time of history.

This book was provided by NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Like A God In Ruins, I just wanted to savor Transcription. Atkinson writes with such economy. Never is a word wasted.
A fantastic picture of post WWII England with an ending I never saw coming.

Another engaging novel with stellar writing from Kate Atkinson. She takes a satisfyingly close look at the individual’s experience of wartime and provides a unique view of espionage with an unwitting MI5 recruit.

I was so looking forward to reading the latest Kate Atkinson novel, having thoroughly enjoyed her Jackson Brodie series and considered Time After Time (along with A God in Ruins) one of my all-time favorites. The pre-pub press has been universally favorable, but I confess I felt really let down by the book for a number of reasons.
First of all, the style screamed for a strong editor. An author who feels the need to complete her sentences with parenthetical phrases (like this one) slows the rhythm of the prose and annoyingly inserts herself in each sentence. A red pencil should have been taken to all of them.. At other times, the sentence construction was so confusing that I had to reread several times to make sense of what was being said.
The plot was similar to Michael Ondaatje's Warlight in that we follow characters who had a role in World War II into the years beyond to see that the end of the war did not come with the signing of treaties but lingered long beyond. In Transcription we alternate between 1940 and 1950 and finally jump to 1980. Frankly the action in so many drab London apartments was too far removed from the drama of the war that I did not find it particularly gripping.The publisher describes Julia's job transcribing conversations as " by turns both tedious and terrifying" but to me it definitely leaned more to the tedious..
Juliet Armstrong just was not a strong enough character to carry the story. She basically stumbled through the war and the events following and got through a number of what were meant to be tense situations by sheer luck. There was literally one moment in the whole book that had me in suspense .and that was 40% of the way into the story. I assume we are meant to think Julia is clever, brave and resourceful but the moments chosen to illustrate Julia's character were curiously bland, except for the times when the reader gets cues that Julia has missed because of her inexperience. By the end of the book I had little more feeling for her than for one of the minor characters. Playing opposite Julia was a whole litany of male characters who flitted in and out of the story without making much of a discernible mark. They were all so clever that the real question to be answered was who is outsmarting whom?
After finishing Transcription, I will no longer automatically await Atklnson's next work with undiluted enthusiasm. I could have given her even fewer stars in my review but I don't want potential readers to think I am just doing a hachet job on this book and have it in for the author. Believe me, I wanted to love Transcription, but it just didn't measure up to her previous works.

As an Atkinson fan, I’m more than satisfied. This is the story (stories) of Juliet Armstrong, a young transcriptionist for MI5 during WWII. Like most Atkinson books, this jumps forward and back in time and events and things about the characters are revealed bit by bit. I don’t want to say too much about Juliet or what happens because I so enjoyed discovering everything for myself and don’t want to spoil it. Whether you’ve read and loved Life Afer Life or the Brody books or not, I encourage you to read this.

I loved this book. T was a great spy story. I really didn't see the coming. Juliet Armstrong was a very likable character as were many in the book. I highly recommend it.

Another tremendous page-turner from Atkinson. Her novels are always entertaining and marvelous--her research is top-notch, and characters are breathing and complicated. I was particularly intrigued with all the WWII sections, and Juliet's life then, but the whole book was a sheer joy, and I'm happy to recommend heartily.

It is 1950 and Juliet Armstrong is trying to live a life of normalcy, but the past won’t let its iron grip slip so easily. During WWII, Armstrong worked for the British Intelligence Services, and as a young woman, she found herself wading in deep waters, following rules set by the men in charge. A life-altering incident is set into motion by a “flamingo,” an Iron Curtain defector, and Juliet will have to come to terms with what was really true or fake in espionage. Filled with suspense, this delightful tale is made even more so by Atkinson’s trademark humor.

I loved this story of espionage in Britain during WWII. The female protagonist was particularly well done! I ordered a copy of one of Atkinson's recommended books at the end because I want to read more.

This story is set in England during WWII. A young woman is assigned to work for a small group within MI5 doing doing mostly clerical tasks, primarily tedious transcriptions from conversations had with British Fascist sympathizers. Eventually, she is asked to do more and has to determine which of her co-workers to be loyal to and whom to trust.

Years later, she is a radio producer at the BBC, and finds herself meeting up with people from her past. Her life is threatened and she again must figure out whom to trust.

The novel kept my interest with some twists and surprising turns.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc for review. All opinions are my own.

This is a historical fiction set mostly in the year 1940, but also has sections in 1950 and 1981 - all from the perspective of Juliet. She is has been newly recruited by MI5 in a mostly secretarial role, transcribing tapes for an agent meeting with Nazi sympathizing citizens. The 1950's portion looks at Juliet's life post-war working in an edu-tainment section of the BBC.

This book was a significant letdown after reading Atkinson's Life after Life and its spinoff A God in Ruins. Juliet feels very much like a background player in her own life - the events of the book mostly just happen to her, rather than electing to have any agency or look into what is happening around her. I think I would've enjoyed this story more from the third person, to explore the motivations of the other characters, as they seemed to have more interesting lives going on. The layout of the book also featured attempts at cliffhangers when switching timelines, but these attempts to heighten excitement in the narrative fell flat.

I'd recommend this novel to people that enjoy smaller scale historical fiction - the world doesn't have to be saved, the big historical markers don't come up. more of the day to day goings on of a regular person.

Writing: 5 Plot: 3 Characters: 3.5

Nw (to me) words:
• flageolet - The flageolet is a woodwind instrument and a member of the fipple flute family.
• priapic - relating to or resembling a phallus.
• Tenebrism - from Italian tenebroso ("dark, gloomy, mysterious"), also occasionally called dramatic illumination, is a style of painting using profoundly pronounced chiaroscuro, where there are violent contrasts of light and dark, and where darkness becomes a dominating feature of the image.

Transcription zigzags between two important periods of Juliet Armstrong’s life — her work as a Transcription typist and sometime spy for MI5 during WWII and her work as a producer for the BBC and occasional safe house manager in the 50s. These are book-ended by brief scenes from 1981.

This is a spy story replete with layers of intrigue and confusion. The twist is that it is told from the perspective of a young and intelligent woman who doesn’t necessarily know what she is getting into and just wants to do something interesting with her life. We watch her thoughts and actions in one time period and understand the ramifications and results in another. The inspiration for the story came from the author’s perusal of recently opened archives of WWII transcripts including information about the “Right Club,” comprised of Nazi sympathizers living in Britain.

To be honest, the action is less pronounced than might be expected — probably a little more true to life than your typical spy stories. The writing is very strong, but I found it hard to care about any of the characters, the protagonist included. On the plus side, it felt quite realistic and Atkinson’s utter prowess with language makes it difficult to put down. Some favorite lines:

“The war had been a hole that had receded and now here it was lapping around her ankles again. She sighed and chastised herself for a sub-standard metaphor.”

“But isn’t artistic endeavor the final refuge of the uncommitted?”

“The war was a clumsily stitched wound and it felt as if it was being opened by something.”

“ ‘You have his curls,’ her mother said. It seems a poor legacy.”

“Radio allowed for a degree of slippage in the gender department.”

“ ‘Crumhorns and flageolets, I expect. A sackbut or two as well,’ Juliet said, pulling these words off an obscure shelf in her memory.”

I also liked the opening quote of Churchill: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

Kate Atkinson never fails to surprise her readers, as she so aptly demonstrates once again in Transcription. Describing the process of writing this novel in her fascinating afterword, she writes “...I would say that it felt like a wrenching apart of history followed by an imaginative reconstruction.” And imaginative it is. Juliet Armstrong, the main character among a large supporting cast, is far from unflawed, and she both wrenches and is wrenched by her role in MI5 during WWII. “They were all pawns, of course, in someone else’s great game.” And yet, her many of her actions were of her own making that could be likened to impulsive and spontaneous moves in that game. The plot is filled with many delicious twists and turns that could have resulted in chaos and confusion in hands less capable than Atkinson’s. Transcription is a shining prize in literature’s great game.

Atkinson, as she tells us in an Afterword, was inspired to write this novel after reading about spies and traitors in London during the Second World War. Thus her heroine, Juliet Armstrong, 18, naive and idealistic, in 1940 joins MI5, Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency.

We begin, however, in 1981, when Juliet has just been hit by a car. As paramedics work to stabilize her, we join her in her thoughts as she remembers her past.

We first go back to 1940, when Juliet was working for Godfrey Toby, who masquerades as a Nazi agent and encourages people with pro-Fascist sympathies to report to him. Juliet sits next door in an adjacent apartment fit out with listening devices and she types up what they say. She observes:

“The main characters in this cast of perfidy were Dolly, Betty, Victor, Walter, Trude and Edith. Each reported on a myriad others, filaments in an evangelistic web of treachery that stretched across the country.”

But they are not the only suspicious characters in this drama. Even the other MI5 operatives act oddly, and suspect one another of being double agents. In fact it is rarely clear who is “one of us” and who is “one of them,” as Juliet muses, offering up wry commentary on them all. She also has numerous fantasies of the MI5 men having romantic fantasies about <em>her</em>, which never pan out, much to her chagrin.

After a while, Julie is asked to try to infiltrate the Right Club. [In real life, this was a small group of anti-semitic fascist sympathizers in Britain’s upper class. The group was formed in May 1939, when the Scottish Unionist MP Archibald Ramsay decided that the British Conservative Party needed to rid itself of perceived Jewish control.]

Juliet’s alias (her “nom de guerre”) for this mission was to be “Iris Carter-Jenkins.” Another MI5 agent to whom she reports, Perigrine Gibbons (“Perry”) asks her to get close to the wealthy Mrs. Scaife, who is “near the top of the heap.” He explains, “Iris has been ‘designed’ to appeal to her.” [It is possible Atkinson adopted this name as a veiled reference to Richard Mellon Scaife, “Funding Father of the Right,” - a right-wing conspiracy theorist (he died in 2014) whose money has established or sustained activist think tanks that have created and marketed very conservative ideas.]

Mrs. Scaife prattles on about the perils of international Jewry, and Iris acts sympathetic.

In alternate chapters, we move to 1950, when Juliet is now a producer at the BBC. Somewhat amusingly, among her colleagues are other former operatives of MI5. She begins to think someone is following her, and she receives a threatening note. There are other odd coincidences that happen to her. She fears her past life in espionage is catching up with her. But there is another possibility:

“Or perhaps someone playing a trick on her, “some kind of game to drive her mad. Gaslighting. But it still left the question of who. And why.”

Evaluation: I wasn’t so enamored of the plot itself of this story, but Atkinson’s skill with prose is a joy to read.

Not all of Kate Atkinson’s novels have been what she calls historical fiction, but the last couple have been. This novel may hew closest to the truth, though like she says in the Author’s Note at the end, she wrenched open history and stuffed it with imaginative reconstruction, at least one fantasy for each fact.

The author tells us afterward what her intentions were. This is particularly delicious, and I argue, respects the reader. We get to look into her construction and think. She answers questions we've formed, and instead of farming out possible answers to various reviewers, she’s blunt with us about elements we’d been wondering about. There is something comparable in theatre, when the actors takes off their masks for the final bow and we all celebrate together.

Atkinson returns to the Second World War, periodic releases from the National Archives of secrets from that time fueling her creative process. When she discovers [true fact] an ordinary-seeming bank clerk was a major cog in rounding up British supporters of Nazis, her story had a frame. When she discovered [true fact] hundreds and hundreds of pages of transcripts of conversations of dissident groups in London, her story had a heart.

What Kate Atkinson does is not necessarily unique (using historical documents to create fiction), but what she does with it is unique. Her style, tone, and characters are recognizably hers. She is funny: one knows there are people out there whose droll delivery of witty responses to ordinary questions is quintessentially British but we don’t come across it enough. Atkinson can do repartee.

By now Atkinson may be incapable now of writing fiction with a chronological timeline. This novel has only three time periods to work with and really only one central character, which simplifies the action enough that I only had to reread an earlier section once. This was partly due to my surprise, maybe a little resentment, and finally pleasure at being taken out of the action at what seemed like a critical moment…again! She’d done that to me in the previous section as well. I was burrowed in like a tick, and am yanked to a later, earlier, whatever time. (I didn't really mind--I was stretching out the experience of reading Atkinson again, luxuriously.) Atkinson manages to satisfy and confound a reader at the same time.

Atkinson’s characters always have the ‘ghost of Jackson Brodie’ about them. This is a very good thing, considering how much we liked Brodie and wouldn’t mind having him resurrected. We could make the case that the main character in this novel, Juliet Armstrong, is a female Jackson Brodie—honest and therefore vulnerable, she doesn’t have so high an opinion of herself that she is insufferable. In the end she is well able to take care of herself. She’s smart, and a very good liar, and keeps herself a little distant. After all, who can one trust?

At eighteen, Juliet is parentless: "her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief." Young and alone, Juliet was not, however, callow. She lied like crazy through a job interview with a flippant and overly-inquisitive young man who interviewed her for a job, which she was surprised she got. Later she learned he'd known every lie, and appreciated the ease with which she misled him.

This book is about spies, spies working in the service of the British government, or so we believe. What is special is that we see what is British about them—what is ordinary, patriotic, courageous, honorable. But we also see a nation at war and we see duplicity, hunger, ambition, pettiness. Then we lay over that the work of the other nations at war, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and a few exceptional people emerge alive, not unscathed, but breathing at the end. The tension comes when we are not sure who will remain standing.

Atkinson writes about the middle of the twentieth century, but she could be talking about the twenty-first:
Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (“The clowns are the dangerous ones, Perry said.”)

and

Do not equate nationalism with patriotism…Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.
One always senses the intelligence in Atkinson’s work. She not only writes a good story--which means getting the humanity right--she makes us think while we read. She’s unpredictable. And frankly, I like her politics. It’s always a pleasure to enjoy another of her books.

This novel is due out September 25th in the U.S., published by Little Brown; it looks like it will be out September 6th in Britain by Transworld. Preorder now!