A Review of Kate Atkinson’s “Transcription”
The Lighter Side of War
One of the books that I have on my Kindle, waiting to be read, is Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. That book got an extraordinary amount of praise from the book publications that I read at the time, which made me interested in it. Alas, it still sits unread, but when Atkinson’s new novel Transcription — a bit of a World War II espionage thriller — came up, I was eager to read it. And so I have. And I have to admit that this book simply wasn’t my cup of tea for a number of reasons. I’ll get into those reasons, but I also have to admit that this book will probably have its supporters. (I haven’t read any other review, to keep my own reviewing taint-free.) I will concede that it is generally well written — if you can overlook the fact that Atkinson loves making tons of parenthetical statements that distract the reader to the point of wanting to throw the book across the room. What’s more, Atkinson is a capable writer who is able to keep all sort of plot threads hanging together. And the book does work to a degree as a sort of semi-comedic thriller at times. Still, I found it lacking, strangely.
Transcription is set in 1940s London and follows the adventures of an 18-year-old woman named Julie Armstrong, who is recruited by British spy agency MI5 to type transcripts of conversations held between Nazi sympathizers in England and a double agent. However, for reasons that are not really clearly explained, she eventually becomes a spy herself and sort of bungles the job while she’s at it. (Which makes you wonder why she was even recruited in the first place.) Flash forward 10 years later and Juliet is working for the BBC but has a foot still stuck in the spy game. When characters from the War begin reappearing in her life, Juliet begins to wonder if her life is truly in danger again. And the novel flips back and forth between these timelines from there.
My biggest beef with Transcription is that it is chock loaded with minor supporting characters — too many of them. It was really hard for me to keep straight who’s who and what their relations were — though that might be the point of a novel that’s about moles and double agents. Still, we find out loads of stuff about Juliet’s coworkers at the BBC, for instance, and not one of them to my recollection has anything to do with the spy story. It’s as though the author was padding things out simply to have a novel instead of a novella. I found the BBC material didn’t really add anything to the story except dollops of humour and little more. In the end, I was kind of confused as to why Atkinson spent so much time on it, except for the point made in an author’s note at the end of the book that histories of the BBC were being read at the same time as this book was being written. Consider it a case of an author falling in love with source material that doesn’t really expose much to the basic plot.
As alluded to earlier, we never really get a good reason as to why Juliet transforms from a typist to a spy, except for perhaps adding a more feminist angle to the story — and I shouldn’t really complain about that as I appreciate where the author may be coming from. Still, Juliet makes some basic mistakes in her work that basically puts the lives and identities of the people she works with in danger, which leads one to wonder what her superiors were thinking. This is a young woman who is untested material, and suddenly she’s allowed to go off and have adventures. Again, I can appreciate where the author is going with this, but it just doesn’t really work in the context of the time period.
Thirdly, the novel has a light, comedic tone that seems to be at odds with the setting. Juliet basically spends the novel cracking jokes to herself, and a major plot point revolves around what happened to a dog (of all things). The tone seems a bit “off” for a WWII novel. I suppose that since the novel is largely set in the early days of the war that this can be sort of overlooked by some readers, but I found that the humor was too “flighty” for lack of a better word — the kind of humor that makes the odd allusion to the works of Shakespeare and such to make this work appear to be more literary and erudite than it needs to be. The novel, to me, risked really walking over the line from lightly humourous to all-out parody. I mean, if you count the number of times the characters sit down for a lovely and delightful afternoon tea (with conversation), you could probably play a drinking game of your own with the book — if you were prone to do so.
Overall, I found my interest waning in this title as it wore on. When a plot twist is revealed in the dying pages of Transcription, it seems to be too little, too late — it’s as though the novel is suddenly taking itself very dead serious all of a sudden, which is the kind of touch that was needed much earlier on. For instance, when Juliet makes her screw ups as a spy, why isn’t she reprimanded? Instead, it’s all treated as a joke when, as it turns out, the stakes — for the most part — are in the 1950s rather high. Perhaps the author was swayed by the fact that this type of spy work didn’t win the war, per se, so she felt she could take some liberties with it, especially when it comes to downplaying certain things.
In any event, I found Transcription to be a rather plodding, confusing and grossly overly humourous novel without any real sense of danger or threat until the very end. While it is competently written, and I think — based on the author’s note — I know where she was trying to go with this, I think this book is a case of an author fabricating things and reaching her own conclusions based on the sparseness of the material she had to work with (MI5 didn’t want to divulge its secrets to her, after all). As a result, Transcription doesn’t really fire on all cylinders as it really should. Which is a shame, of course, because, ultimately, I think I’m going to put off reading Life After Life that much longer now. Oh well. Plenty of other books to read, I suppose.
Kate Atkinson’s Transcription was published by Little, Brown and Company on September 25, 2018.
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