Transcription Kate Atkinson

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marymary
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Transcription Kate Atkinson

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I came to this novel because I had watched the BBC drama Life After Life and had found that an interesting ”caught in a time loop” treatment. In Transcription the novel begins in the eighties with an elderly lady, Juliet, getting knocked down then recalling fragments of her earlier life in the forties and fifties. Firstly it’s important to acknowledge the author’s throwaway humour which will have the reader laughing aloud from time to time. Juliet is an orphan who falls into a job at the BBC creating, then producing content for the various Schools programmes that teach/propagandise all that is/was ”this England”. Juliet is given an offer that she can’t refuse to type up transcripts for the secret service from recordings of fifth columnists meeting with an agent provocateur in a flat next door – who are pro-Germany hiding in England in plain sight. Juliet veers between boring and thrilling tasks and gradually starts to piece together who can, or cannot, be trusted amongst her various colleagues and those she is coming into contact with. The more Juliet does well for MI5, the more she is asked to take on – including false identities – and the bodies start to pile up.

My main problem with the text is that it increasingly shifts from one decade into another with fast forwards then leaps back. This is done with few clues to the reader and I found myself wondering if the digital copy I was reading had missing pages. I think this is meant to replicate someone’s stream of consciousness on their deathbed as connections are made between events but as it increases in frequency towards the end I began to be irritated by it. Juliet is of course unreliable precisely because she is dying but the war for her was both thrilling and mystifying.

In my opinion, if Kate Atkinson wasn’t already a highly successful writer this novel would have had a much heavier edit to help the reader out a tad more.

There’s an author’s note about the real events the novel was influenced by so the far fetched recollections aren’t as far fetched and farcical as I thought while reading.
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