Spy learns game of deception in new novel
In the early years of World War II, Juliet Armstrong, a spy for Britain’s MI5 Security Service and the protagonist of Kate Atkinson’s “Transcription,” took a pearl necklace off a dead woman. She notes upon doing so that, inside each pearl, “there was a little piece of grit. … The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.”
One imagines that espionage work involves the same qualities, although definitions of protection, grit and truth may vary. Over the course of this wartime saga, Armstrong encounters a lot of people whose understanding of the truth depends on their perspective.
At 17, Juliet becomes an orphan upon the death of her mother, a dressmaker until illness prevented her from working. By 1940, when she’s 18, Juliet applies to work at the Security Service in the hope of a better life, only to discover that her tasks are limited to filing.
That changes when she meets Peregrine Gibbons, a one-time mesmerist perpetually clad in “top-to-toe herringbone tweed.” He recruits Juliet for what he calls a “kind of deceptive game.”
The job: to work in a London flat and transcribe the meetings that occur next door, where another MI5 agent, Godfrey Toby — whom Ms. Atkinson describes, in one of many memorable phrases, as “an unassuming, Pooterish figure” — would “masquerade as a Nazi agent and encourage people with pro-fascist sympathies to report to him.”
Early scenes of Juliet’s transition are slow, with Ms. Atkinson laying out too much information about Juliet’s colleagues and Toby’s informants. But the novel gains considerable tension after Gibbons, impressed with Juliet’s work, gives her a more dangerous
assignment.
He hands her a gun and tells her to infiltrate an establishment, the Right Club, and procure the Red Book, a volume that lists the group’s members. The leader is Mrs. Scaife, an anti-Semite who wants to save Britain from the “scum of the earth,” which she defines as Jews and Communists.
Much of the action in the chapters set during 1940 dramatize Juliet’s involvement in the world of espionage, activities that are complicated by, among other factors, her deepening and unreciprocated affection for Gibbons.
These passages are among the book’s best. Less involving are the chapters set in 1950. Now, Juliet is a producer of BBC radio programs for children. She had assumed that her espionage days were long over. One day, however, she sees a man who she sure is Godfrey Toby. He tells her she is mistaken.
Soon, other figures from her war years appear. An RAF group captain brings to her flat a defector, a Czech scientist, and asks her to act as a safe house. That’s only the start of the mysterious occurrences that lead Juliet to realize that her espionage career may be about to resume.
The postwar chapters may lack the drama of the wartime sections, but Juliet is always fascinating to follow. And Ms. Atkinson gives her a cutting wit. When guntoting Juliet suspects she’s being followed and wonders what disguise the pursuer has adopted, she thinks, “[S]he couldn’t shoot every drab housewife — she’d be here all day.”
Late in “Transcription,” Juliet thinks about the many aliases she has adopted and asks, “[W]hat constituted real? Wasn’t everything, even this life itself, just a game of deception?” Those questions are as relevant today as they were 70 years ago. And part of the pleasure in reading this work is in watching Juliet go from patriot to a cynical tool of the government, a pearl trying to maintain its luster, struggling to protect itself.