![]() ![]() Her assignment – to spend her days in an apartment transcribing conversations taking place in the adjoining room between a spy, Godfrey Todd, and the ‘home grown evil’ (Nazi sympathisers) who divulge their secrets to him. We see Juliet at eighteen, plucked from a secretarial pool in Security Services by the tweed-clad Perry Gibbons to be his ‘girl’ in a vague corner of MI5. Atkinson swiftly heads back to 1940, from where the bulk of the novel’s action unfolds. Shifting back to 1950, we see Juliet working for the BBC’s school’s programming division, helping them repackage British history for educational purposes. Transcription begins with a short sequence set in 1981 in which Juliet Armstrong has an awkward encounter with a ghost from her past. ![]() It’s inspired by real events the author uncovered in National Archive files, in particular, the story of a British spy who posed as a Gestapo officer during the so-called ‘Phoney War’ (1939-40). ![]() Atkinson’s latest novel, Transcription, mines a similar historical period. ![]() Life After Life (2013) and its companion, A God in Ruins (2015), are brilliant evocations of England, set predominantly during World War II and its aftermath, that use their period settings to investigate complex stories about the mutability of identity. Kate Atkinson has a gift for blending fiction with historical detail. ![]()
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