Review: Transcription

Transcription by Kate Atkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"It was a cruel thing, trying to sprout and find the light of day. It was truth. She wasn’t sure that she wanted it."

Spies. Double Spies. The Blitz.

A not-so-ordinary girl is recruited into a network of clandestine operatives working to infiltrate secret Nazi sympathizers and fascist circles in England. This girl, Juliet Armstrong, possesses an odd combination of naiveté and cut-throat. If you like the idea of an incurably polite young woman carefully washing blood off her hands, you might enjoy Transcription.

Juliet (the only character we actually get to know well) at first has the unenviable task of typing up the transcripts of secretly recorded conversations. So, she knows a lot. This leads to her general traipsing around fifth column schemes, sometimes purposefully, sometimes not. Events were often implausible, but it is fiction, after all.

The writing is reliably eloquent – Kate Atkinson is a crackerjack wordsmith. However, there was not enough action in the story for me, and the topography of the overall plot was disjointed. A strictly linear narrative can be boring, I agree, but the hopscotching timeline and delayed reveals were frustrating.


View all my reviews