In an afterword laying out the historical roots of Transcription, Atkinson describes how she became interested in an MI5 operation that spied on fascist sympathizers in England. Much of the humor in Transcription has to do with the ironic contrast between what women are thinking and what good manners permit them to say. Its central mystery is how the Juliet of 1940, a naïve orphan, became her weary and increasingly paranoid postwar self. Like le Carré’s spies, Atkinson’s main character, Juliet Armstrong-depicted at age 18, when she first goes to work for MI5, and a decade later, producing innocuous children’s programming for the BBC after the war-has come to suspect that “it wasn’t a matter of sides at all, it was probably much more complicated than that.” The novel flips back-and-forth across this 10-year divide. Kate Atkinson’s new novel, Transcription, resembles le Carré’s fiction-despite being set during and just after the supposedly less-ambiguous conflict of the Second World War-as it feels its way through the seemingly impenetrable moral tangles of espionage.

By zeroing in on the inherent duplicity of the trade and the murky politics of the Cold War, he kicked the form into a higher gear than anything offered by the camp wish fulfillment of Ian Fleming’s James Bond series or the straightforward heroics of Erskine Childers and John Buchan. For the past 50 years, all spy novels have been written under the shadow cast by John le Carré.

Transcription kate atkinson review