Transcription

Transcription – by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson is probably my favorite author, and no other author gets me as excited when I find out they have penned and released a new novel.  Overall, I felt this release was good, but I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t rival some of her better works. This one seemed to falter a bit.

If you’re a fan of Atkinson, you tend to notice trends with her characters and settings.  She mainly focuses on female leads, all take place in England, and there seems to be a lot of action that takes place during the second world war.  Her characters are a rather sad lot as well.  A lot of people plodding through a miserable life with one mishap after another slapping them regularly in the face.

A lot of those traits are here, but our protagonist Juliet Armstrong seems to be a bit happier with her lot in life that what we’re used to inside an Atkinson book. 

Although an 18-year old orphan, Juliet snags a job as a low-level spy in 1940 when Britain found themselves, once again, at war with neighboring Germany.  What many people don’t know is that the early years of the second global conflict actually had a lot of German sympathizers in merry old England.  No one really wanted another war with Germany, and Hitler didn’t seem quite as bad as history would one day show us.   Sadly, anti-Semitism was (and still is) a global problem, so many of the fascist Brits were quite o.k. with Hitler’s solution to the “Jewish” problem.

So Armstrong’s main job is to hide out in an apartment adjacent to another apartment where ‘secret’ meetings are being held by enemy sympathisers. The meetings are clandestinely recorded, and Juliet’s job is to transcribe the recordings. As the story progresses, we see Juliet move onto other things, and the story actually zig-zags a bit between the 1940s and 1050s.

I won’t really go into what Juliet does in the 1950s, since ‘plots’ have never really been Kate Atkinson’s forte.  What makes Atkinson’s stories so appealing are the characters, the dialogue, and her descriptions of the situations and the surroundings. This is also why many don’t enjoy Kate Atkinson. These people prefer a real STORY, so when the actual story isn’t as important to Kate Atkinson, one can see and excuse the fact that many just don’t find this author their particular cup of tea.

If you’ve never read a Kate Atkinson, I would advise you to start with one of her other works.  Some of my particular favorites were “Human Croquet”, “Behind the Scenes at a Museum”, and the wonderful “Life After Life” (easily one my all-time favorites; again though, many don’t like it). I also enjoyed her Jackson Brodie mysteries a bit more than this one as well.

A bit of a slump for Atkinson. Well written and entertaining, but a far cry from her best.