Atkinson is a masterful narrative strategist, linking her two stories by the appearance in Juliet’s postwar world of figures from her MI5 days and the suggestion that she is now at risk for what happened then. Often, when writers attempt to tell two related but different stories, the reader picks a favorite and loses interest in the other. What happens in 1940 to change Juliet’s view of the world is revealed gradually, as Atkinson jumps from wartime London to 1950 and Juliet’s postwar life as a radio producer for the BBC. In 1940, during the “phony war,” 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is a well-read, if somewhat naive, young woman, “more concerned with the introduction of meat rationing” than with the coming of the real war, “the one where you might be killed.” Even her work, transcribing conversations between an MI5 agent and various fifth columnists, seems oddly unthreatening, given the dim-witted ordinariness of these comically British would-be traitors, obsessed with their numerous “biscuit breaks.” But then, suddenly, it doesn’t seem ordinary anymore. Addressed to Juliet, the notes warn that “you will pay for what you did.As in her sublime Life after Life(2013), Atkinson again jumps between different periods in the mid-twentieth century to tell the story of a singular Englishwoman trapped in the vice of history. Adding to the weirdness are those anonymous notes that someone has begun dropping off at the BBC. She senses she is being followed: A man with a pockmarked face and a woman wearing a headscarf garishly decorated with parrots keep popping up. Scattered in between are long sections of the story set in 1950, when Juliet is employed by BBC radio as a producer of educational programs with titles such as the “Explorers’ Club” and “English for the Under-Nines.” But all is not well in Juliet’s placid and somewhat dull postwar world. The very first page of “Transcription” opens on Juliet’s death in 1981 - a death we witness with different emotions when we return to the scene briefly at the very end of the novel. Atkinson’s many fans know better than to expect a straightforward chronological narrative from her instead, she prefers to jump around, intensifying the poignancy of her characters’ lives by giving her readers godlike glimpses of how they will eventually turn out.

Transcription by kate atkinson review