Joy is an admirable goal

Canadian cover

"Joy is an admirable goal." Juliet said. "Completely unobtainable, of course."

I was so looking forward to a new Kate Atkinson book! Transcription satisfied. It bears her trademark sense of humour: dark, unfiltered, and self-reflective.

"Do you like art?" he asked abruptly, taking her off her guard.

"Art?" What did he mean by that? She had come under the wing of an enthusiastic art teacher at school, Miss Gillies. ("You have an eye," Miss Gillies told her. I have two, she thought.) She used to visit the National Gallery before her mother died. She disliked Fragonard and Watteau and all that pretty French stuff that would make any self-respecting sans-culottes want to chop someone's head off. Similarly Gainsborough and his affluent aristocrats posing smugly with their grand perspectives. And Rembrandt, for whom she had a particular disregard. What was so wonderful about an ugly old man who kept painting himself all the time?

Perhaps she didn't like art, in fact she felt quite opinionated about it. "Of course I like art," she said. "Doesn't everyone?"

"You'd be surprised. Anyone in particular?"

"Rembrandt," she said, placing her hand on her heart in a gesture of devotion. She liked Vermeer, but she wasn't going to share that with a stranger. "I revere Vermeer," she had once told Miss Gillies. It seemed a lifetime ago now.

US cover

Juliet thinks one thing, but says the opposite. She's perfectly suited to being a spy. And so she is recruited to MI5, initially to transcribe recordings of Nazi sympathizers reporting to their informant, but later she's awarded a mission of her own. When Juliet is first being interviewed, she's asked to choose whether she'd be a Communist or a Fascist (you know, if a gun were held to her head). I annoyed a lot of people while reading this book by asking them exactly that. (Funny, no one admits to choosing to be a Fascist.) So much depends, as Juliet notes, on who's holding the gun.

Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.

One thing Transcription got me thinking about was personas and how we manage (or don't) to keep multiple personas straight. Juliet is coached to stick as close to the truth as possible; it's very easy — and dangerous — how one lie leads to another.

(How well do we really know anyone? We only know them insofar as they let us know them. Are we the same person to everyone? Surely my neighbour, my coworker, my friend from university would describe me in completely different terms. [And what do I make of my neighbours' visitors? I have concocted their stories from what I've seen and what I've heard.] To what extent do I manipulate their perceptions of me?)

Although the story is told in the third person, it takes the point of view of Juliet throughout the novel. We are treated to the running commentary inside Juliet's head, not anyone else's head. As noted in Slate:

She notices everything, judges most of it, says little, and is listened to even less. In this sense, Atkinson suggests, all women are spies; they appear to be what others need them to be and contain a secret world all their own.

UK cover

I like Juliet; she questions everything, she thinks things she's not supposed to think.

She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl there was little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl, wasn't it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.

One could say it's an unreliable narrator, and it's thanks to this that Atkinson pulls off the plot twists.

Somewhere along the line in her own past life she must have taken a wrong turning, Juliet thought. Why else would she be sitting here? Giselle came into Juliet's mind. Despite dying at the hands of the Nazis, she had never merited the soubriquet "poor." You had to ask yourself, which was better — to have sex with any number of interesting (albeit possibly evil) men (and some women too, apparently), to be glamorously decadent, to ingest excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol and die a horrible but heroic death at a relatively young age, or to end up in Schools Broadcasting at the BBC?

It was a relief when five o'clock came around.

Juliet never obtains joy, of course.

[The covers are so different! I like the Canadian one best; the title font wins it. The flamingo is a reference to a codename late in the story.]