Here the narrative really takes off watching through Juliet’s irreverent eyes as MI5 recruits upper-class “girls” for possible spy work is fascinating and deliciously comic. The novel then turns to 1940, when Juliet - 18, orphaned, given to sassy parenthetical observations - first joins MI5. But when she rushes up to greet him, he denies his identity, insisting she has mistaken him for someone else and leaving her shaken. On the street during her lunch break, Juliet spots a man, Godfrey Toby, with whom she worked very closely back in 1940. But what interests Atkinson here is less the war’s aftermath than its simmering persistence. Fans of “Life After Life,” Atkinson’s 2013 masterpiece, will recognize the artful pathos with which she renders the war’s cratering effect on Londoners. At the outset, “just 60 years old,” she is struck by a car and knows she will die two pages later, we meet her at 28, working for the BBC in 1950, a time when London (and virtually everyone in it) was still hobbled by the war. “Transcription” visits Juliet at three periods of her life, which are nested like Russian dolls. Into these dramatic environs Atkinson injects one Juliet Armstrong, the “girl” (as in: “I need a girl”) selected by MI5 to transcribe the secretly recorded dialogues. In an adjacent apartment, MI5 agents recorded their conversations. A British MI5 agent, posing as an agent of Nazi Germany, hosted regular meetings for fifth-column members in a London apartment wired with microphones.

In an afterword, Atkinson explains that the sort of covert operation she has dramatized actually did take place. Atkinson plumbs a more obscure realm of MI5’s activity: its infiltration, during World War II, of the so-called fifth column, a network of British Nazi sympathizers who revered Hitler and eagerly awaited Germany’s conquest of Europe. The spying in “Transcription” happens under the aegis of MI5, the British intelligence agency whose elite affiliations and Cold War defections are well known. No wonder spies, like detectives, seem inherently literary figures, whether they’re real, invented or - as with the spies in Kate Atkinson’s intriguing new novel - a bit of both.

$28.Īll novels are spy novels, Ian McEwan once observed, and it’s a reasonable claim: Fiction nearly always relies on a clever observer to pry inside the minds and lives of its characters, to lay bare for the reader their deep motivations and intimate secrets.

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