There is plenty of foreshadowing and even explicit text that lets us know that something very bad happened while Juliet was active with MI5 and that a reckoning is due. It takes so long for the plots to get going that I was a bit frustrated. In 1950, we are treated to some backstage backbiting before Juliet starts to receive threatening letters and sees signs that someone is following her. Although Juliet dreams of adventure and possible romance as a young MI5 transcriptionist, she has weeks of dull typing ahead of her before she debuts as a field agent. The 19 sections alternate in long chapters, lengthy enough that I felt like I had been fully immersed in one of Juliet’s “lives” before switching over to the other plot. It’s not glamorous at all, but it gives her good cover while she moonlights as a safe house keeper for MI5.

In 1950, Juliet Armstrong is a show producer for some minor radio programs put out by the BBC. The agent is their lead spy in a major operation to infiltrate, then arrest as many of the enemy amateur spies and saboteurs as possible. In the chapters set in 1940, we see Juliet as she is inducted into MI5 and is assigned to transcribe records made by bugging an apartment where another agent meets with Nazi fifth columnists. Even if they did, however, they couldn’t have known what she meant. The people around her can’t quite make them out.

We meet Juliet in 1981, decades after the events that make up the bulk of Transcription. She has just been hit by a car and is in the process of saying her last words. And yet, we see her play a small role in MI5’s operation to turn or arrest as many Nazi agents as they can in the months before World War II began. It doesn’t take us long to know that Juliet lies compulsively, has sticky fingers, and is much more “pragmatic” than loyal. What does one look for in a potential spy? Is it loyalty to a country? Is it knowing them so thoroughly that one knows exactly what they’ll do in any situation? Or is it recognizing the ability to act and improvise on the spot? In the case of Juliet Armstrong, the protagonist of Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, perhaps it’s just that there is just such an overwhelming need for relatively trustworthy women who can type quickly and made a decent cup of tea.

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