Transcription
Ratings40
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings40
Average rating3.5
A dramatic story of WWII espionage, betrayal, and loyalty, by the #1 bestselling author of Life After Life In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence. Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of the best writers of our time.
Reviews with the most likes.
Review pending, maybe until I reread it? I liked it but I'm not sure I got it as fully as I should have.
I so enjoyed Life After Life and found Transcription to be a bit of a let down. The characters never revealed enough of themselves for me to invest in them and I found the structure to be a bit unwieldy. There were sections that I flew through but overall I found the novel to be a bit more work than I wanted it to be.
A very sedate spy novel with exactly the sort of ending I expected from nearly the beginning. But it's very well constructed.
Transcription is a spy novel, but different from most of the spy novels I've read over the years. Juliet Armstrong, the protagonist, is drawn into working for MI5 during World War II not out of a desire to be a spy, but out of need for a job and a headmistress's recommendation to a recruiter. She goes along with what she is asked to do, and thereby ends up transcribing the conversations of British Fascists with an MI5 agent they think is an agent for Nazi Germany. In the course of doing this work, her wit, her energy and her daring are noticed, and she's asked to do other jobs as well.
The novel switches back and forth between events in 1940 when Juliet is working for MI5, and 1950 when she's working for the BBC. In 1950, her old association with MI5 intrudes on her life again and she puts her wit, energy, and daring to work to try understand what is happening. The story relies a little bit on information not revealed to the reader until the opportune time, but for the most part the reader catches on as Juliet does.
I really enjoyed Juliet herself, who is not an especially compliant female. Her responses to people were surprising at times–oppositional, sympathetic, brusque, vulnerable, but not lukewarm. She dives right into fraught situations instead of avoiding them. Despite her ambivalence about spying, I thought she was probably pretty well suited to it.
