Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

[lisa_goldstein]

I don’t buy hardbacks very often, and never without a lot of deliberation, but when I saw Transcription by Kate Atkinson I picked it up immediately.  Unfortunately… well, not only was it disappointing, she did something to her readers that I just don’t think is fair.  I may be making too much of this, though.

Transcription is the story of Juliet Armstrong, who is recruited by MI5 during the Second World War.  Her job interview is so slapdash it would be completely unbelievable, except that this seems to be the way the agency really worked.  These are the people who hired Kim Philby, after all, and kept him on after some pretty suspicious behavior, just because he had the same sort of background as his recruiters.

Juliet starts by transcribing the conversations of fifth columnists, but she moves quickly up the espionage ladder to the point where she’s mingling with the upper classes and sounding them out on their views.  After the war she goes to work at the BBC, where she receives a note saying, “You will pay for what you did.”  But which operation, which betrayal, is coming due?

Atkinson is usually wonderful at characterization, at interior monologues that reveal fully rounded people in all their quirky, impractical, furious, stubborn glory.  But Juliet never really leaves the page; pretty much the only thing we learn about her is that she’s a terrific liar, though we never find out why.  And Atkinson’s characters are usually very funny, with their own unique ways of making sense of the world, but Juliet’s sole eccentricity seems to be that she dislikes cliches, especially cliches about eyes and ears: “You have a good ear,” a character tells her, to which she says, “I have two, sir.”  After a while she sounds like that pedantic English teacher you had in high school, the one who went off on tangents while everyone else fidgeted in their seats and stopped listening.

The unfair thing…well, in the interests of not giving too much away I can only say that at the end we learn something new about Juliet.  This is something that Juliet has known the whole time, and, more importantly, that the narrator has known the whole time, and the only reason for bringing it out at the end is to surprise the reader.  That strategy might make sense if the book were in first person, if Juliet were telling the story and trying to hide her secret from the reader and the world (like that Agatha Christie novel I don’t want to name, because even naming it might spoil it.  You probably know the one I mean, though).  But there’s no reason for an objective narrator not to give us this information along with everything else.  And there’s very little that leads up to it; in fact, if you come across someone who says they knew what was happening before the end you have my permission to call them an arrant liar.

So am I just being cranky, like Juliet and her problem with cliches?  Or is this truly a breach of the reader-author contract?

Comments

[sergebroom]

"...These are the people who hired Kim Philby, after all, and kept him on after some pretty suspicious behavior, just because he had the same sort of background as his recruiters..."

That's pretty much what John Le Carre said a few months ago on "60 Minutes" when his latest novel came out.

[philrm]

I can't quite recall the details now but there was a piece in the NYRB a while back (concerning a new book about Kim Philby) which mentioned that there was an uproar in the mid-60s caused by the editor of some leftish newspaper who wrote a scathing editorial making the same point: that being of the right class and having the right pedigree trumped everything else. Guy Burgess, for example, was a self-destructive alcoholic, so what does the British government do? Send him to liaise with the US State Department!

[sergebroom]

Makes perfect sense. I'm so glad the smart folks are in charge.

[lisa_goldstein]

The whole story is really fascinating. I read a bit about it after I heard Tim Powers talk about his book Declare, which is about that whole time.