"Transcription" by Kate Atkinson

“Juliet felt slighted yet relieved. It was curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord. She felt an odd pang at the sight of him. She had been fond of him. She had been his girl. Reader, I didn’t marry him, she thought.”

― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

I started listening to this in 2021, picked it up again July 2023, and finished it later that year. In 1940, 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying.

I have read all of the Jackson Brodie books by Kate Atkinson, and would love to see her publish more. The first of the series, Case Histories, is one of those books that I have read several times, picking it up again because I couldn't remember having read it before. That makes it seem like the book is forgettable, but that's not really true. I remembered the story as I was reading it, but the story is so good I decided to finish. I truly fell in love with Jackson and the women in his life in the third book, When Will There Be Good News, and meeting Reggie Chase was a boon. I enjoyed watching her grow up over the next three books, and her views on Jackson always make me smile.

So, I wanted to read other books by Atkinson assuming they would result in more love affairs between me and her characters, but that wasn't to be. I tried Life After Life, but never could get past the first few chapters. Then I saw Transciption, and was intrigued by the premise. I finished the book, but it did not turn me on, and I'm not out looking for more Atkinson books.

Juliet Armstrong is hired by Mi5 to serve as a transcriber of conversations of British Nazi sympathizers that have been surreptitiously recorded. The work is tedious, and so are the parts of the book where this work is described. We bounce in time from her war work to her work as a BBC producer in the 1950s. In the 1940s, Juliet developed some strange relationships with the men she worked for and the men she helped spy on. Those relationships lead to dangerous situations when she is working in television.

I admit having difficulty following what was happening to Juliet over time, maybe because I kept stepping away from the book and coming back to it, but also because I wasn't sure whether Juliet was a reliable narrator or not. I ended up finishing the book just to finish it, hoping that some good resolution would come to pass.

It seems that Atkinson writes more historical fiction than she does the type of detective with foibles books that make up the Jackson Brodie series, and that is disappointing. I found reading Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book a similar experience in that I wanted to love other things that McCall Smith wrote, but found the other books of his that I tried unappealing in the same way as Kate Atkinson's books, long on description about relationships and short on charming personalities.