Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

A new book by Atkinson is always a cause for celebration and this one doesn’t disappoint.  Like many of her best novels, it is set in England during the Second World War.  And like some, it darts back and forth in time, from the war years, to 1950, to 1980 and back again.  Young Juliet Armstrong, who has recently lost her mother and is alone in the world at eighteen, is recruited into M15 in 1940.  Her job, not too fascinating, is to transcribe recordings secretly obtained of meetings between an M15 agent and British Fascists who support Hitler and his aims.  But things don’t stay boring as Juliet is pulled further into the shadowy world of espionage.  The bright, brittle, witty chatter that makes up most of the book is reminiscent of a fast-talking Forties comedy of manners, but the undertone is distinctly more reminiscent of LeCarre’s world of  ambiguously moral figures during the war years and the Cold War.  “This England,” indeed.  335 pp.