Spy novel toys with expectations

With “Transcription,” British literary shape-shifter Kate Atkinson has wandered out from the preserves of “high art” by writing a traditional spy story. And I do mean traditional, as in double agents, disappearing ink, corpses spirited away in rugs, recording devices hidden in walls and a plucky young heroine who knows how to use a pistol when backed into a tight corner.

Juliet Armstrong is an 18-yearold file clerk in 1940 when fate, in the form of the British Security Service otherwise known as MI5, plucks her out of her routine and throws her into the dodgy world of “counter-subversion.” Together with a couple of recording engineers, Juliet spends days crouched over listening devices in a London flat, eavesdropping on conversations that her boss, Godfrey Toby, conducts next door with his visitors, all of whom are “fifth columnists,” or British Nazi sympathizers. Since Juliet’s job is to transcribe these conversations, some of the humor in “Transcription” derives from her frustrations in trying to make sense of what’s often a mass of mumbles.

Atkinson’s many fans know better than to expect a straightforward chronological narrative from her; instead, she prefers to jump around, intensifying the poignancy of her characters’ lives by giving her readers godlike glimpses of how they will eventually turn out. The very first page of “Transcription” opens on Juliet’s death in 1981 — a death we witness with different emotions when we return to the scene briefly at the very end of the novel. Scattered in between are long sections of the story set in 1950, where all is not well in Juliet’s placid and somewhat dull postwar world. She senses she is being followed and she’s getting anonymous notes at work that warn, “you will pay for what you did.”

What Juliet “did” during the war makes for suspenseful reading, and Atkinson clearly has fun resuscitating classic whiteknuckle moments from old espionage novels and films.

Espionage is a grim business, but Atkinson’s wry style imbues the world of “Transcription” with moments of brisk cheer, as if Ian Fleming had been crossed pollinated with Barbara Pym.

Juliet does indeed find a kind of “better life somewhere,” but it’s one that readers would never wish on her. That ultimate paradox is a testament to Atkinson’s inventiveness as a storyteller, as well as to her powers for creating characters too real for comfort.