“Transcription”

Everyone loves Kate Atkinson, but I think writers may have a particular admiration for her. She dissolves the choices that bedevil us: between big plots and wry, acute, noticing sentences; between genre and literary fiction; between the wildly popular and the wildly nuanced. Her new spy novel, “Transcription,” returns to World War II, also the subject of her best book, “Life After Life.” Having been struck by a car in 1981, Juliet Armstrong, lying in the road, flashes back to the war, which she spent involved in the complex game of flushing out England’s homegrown enemies. Is this vengeance at a distant remove? “Transcription” is a minor work in the Atkinson canon – a bit meandering, a bit quiet – but is nonetheless a joy to read. Above all, it continues the author’s vital project of reconstituting how we understand British women of that era – not as dutiful handmaidens of the home front, but as flesh-and-blood girls of 18, 19, who across every class were willing to die for their ideals.