In Transcription by Kate Atkinson, Juliet Armstrong finds herself swept along the currents of World War II to become “someone’s girl,” making tea and transcribing the audio recordings of homegrown Nazi sympathizers.
Having found my way to Kate Atkinson’s writing by way of Life After Life, I’ve now read most of her published work. She is one of the most versatile writers I’ve ever read but with Transcription, she seems to have fallen prey to that thing that happens when a tv show or movie is made of a popular author’s stories- she is writing for the visual impact on a screen, not the story on the page.
Atkinson is one of the writers whom I always read the afterword as she often tells the reader what inspired that particular story, usually a true story as interesting as the fictional. In the case of Transcription, she describes how reading de-classified MI5 files led her to think of the typist, anonymous but most likely a woman, who transcribed recordings of Nazi sympathizers in London. This is an interesting story, and Atkinson uses Juliet as an observer, a young woman who is assumed to be almost anything and everything by those around her, protected by her own naivete and presumed anonymity.
Although Atkinson uses flashbacks to great effect in other books, I found the paired flashbacks and chapter-ending cliffhangers to be overused in this one. For example, at one point later in the book, Juliet enters her apartment to find the lights won’t work and someone is there, but who? The chapter ends with what one imagines to be a smash cut to black and jump-scare music. The next chapter opens with a flashback and a “Ten Years Ago” superimposed over a wide-shot of London pretty much floats across the reader’s field of vision.
For some readers, this may not detract but I found it led to a hurried ending with distractingly layered flashbacks and unearned revelations. In all, I was disappointed in Transcription and would rather read the story of that anonymous typist Ms. Atkinson describes in the afterword.