Whose truths are they anyway?

Transcription, Kate Atkinson’s 11th novel, sees her returning to the detective fiction she honed in her series about Jackson Brodie, the haunted private eye who, after the murder of his young sister, chased the killers of girls. It also pursues some of the themes of her more recent fictions, Life After Life and A God in Ruins, which explored the ambiguities of war, and questions of chance and fate, with lives played out in multiple permutations. There is, however, no professional detective in Transcription. Instead it falls to an ordinary young woman to fathom the meaning of her life and, by extension, what it means to be caught in the net of history.

This time around it’s not so much life after life, but aftermath and afterlife that Atkinson is concerned with, making the point that our lives are not tidily parcelled but extend beyond moments of drama into periods of consequence and reckoning. Bookended by two brief scenes in 1981, Transcription jumps between 1940, when a newly orphaned, 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is recruited as a typist into MI5, and a decade later when she’s working as a producer of children’s radio programmes for the BBC. In the later period she finds people long thought dead, abroad, in prison, or simply gone from her life, returning to haunt her. Is this her imagination running away with her — the thing Perry, her boss at MI5 repeatedly warned against? Or should the threatening notes she’s been receiving be taken seriously?

Contained in this predicament is the question Atkinson wants us to consider: what does it mean to be a good reader — of her book, of course, but also of the world? The transcriptions Juliet makes are of secretly recorded conversations between English fifth columnists — disaffected aristocrats, ‘frustrated housewives’ — and Godfrey Toby, someone they believe to be a Gestapo agent, but who in fact works for MI5.