It's an encounter that, although she doesn't realise it at first, is the beginning of her life as a secret agent.Īs we follow Juliet’s life across two narratives, one in 1940 and one in 1950, Atkinson expertly teases the reader with fragments, sometimes hopeful, often foreboding, of what is to come in both eras Juliet’s thoughts are disrupted by uncomfortable memories. A chance encounter with a wartime colleague, who pretends not to recognise her, sends her troubled mind – and the novel's narrative – back to 1940, when 18-year-old Juliet is called for an interview at an office in Pall Mall. The story begins in 1950, when Juliet Armstrong is working as a producer at the BBC. That's the question that inspired Kate Atkinson's superb new novel Transcription. But while Roberts’s contribution has now been publicly acknowledged, what of the anonymous typists who transcribed those endless conversations? And all those conversations with fifth columnists on the Edgeware Road were being recorded and then carefully transcribed.Īlong with Tar Robertson’s double-agent network, the work of King and his handler Victor Rothschild effectively rendered all Nazi espionage attempts in the UK useless. As official archives released in 2014 reveal, he was a bank clerk turned MI5 agent called Eric Roberts.

He did not, because of course Jack King was not a Nazi agent. They had come to Jack King in the belief that he was a senior Gestapo agent who would pass on all the information they gave him directly to Berlin. They all had one thing in common, however: they were committed to the Nazi cause. There he received a wide variety of people, from office workers to astrologers. Addressed to Juliet, the notes warn that “you will pay for what you did.In 1942, a man known to his visitors as Jack King set himself up in a flat in London’s Edgeware Road. 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 kate