Book Review - Transcription by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson is one of my favorite authors. I voted Life After Life a winner a few years ago.  Now with Transcription she’s created a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit, and empathy. (cover blurb)

Back and forth between 1940 and 1950, we follow Juliet Armstrong – eighteen years old and recruited into espionage by a department of MI5. She’s typing transcriptions (secretly) in a house where folks with Nazi and fascist leanings come to report and plan for an overthrow. Her work is tedious and terrifying.  Flash forward to 1950 and Julia is a radio producer for the BBC. However, her time spent with MI5 is coming back to haunt her. She’s under threat, running into past “spies”, and questioning her past.

P.271  A small shift in the air. The faintest rustle – a bird settling in a nest. Breathing. A sigh. She could just make out the silhouette of someone sitting at the table.

Stealthily, Juliet retrieved the Mauser from her bag and advanced cautiously. It seemed impossible. And yet.

The person who had the greatest claim on her soul. A sudden terror made her heart spasm.

Twists and turns. Tight writing. Rich characters. Kate Atkinson draws you in, turns you around, and has you looking over your shoulder. Transcription is a jolly good read!

Book Review: A God in Ruins

Last year I declared Life After Life by Kate Atkinson my favorite book. The story and writing was stunning – very unique.  Now her new book, A God in Ruins, is not really a  sequel but contains many of the same characters.  Instead of Ursula, we read younger brother Teddy’s story – heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather. Atkinson handles time in a unique fashion. We read about Teddy as a grandfather and then seamlessly move back to his WWII pilot days and harrowing danger. She gives witness to an ordinary man and his path through extraordinary times.  

Here are some samples of her writing.  P.97 Teddy’s attempts to be an author are a struggle.  The great authors of the past had set standards that made his own attempts at artifice look puny. He could find no engagement with the one-dimensional lives he had created. If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around on the foothills of Olympus.  

p.135 the move to an assisted living center.  He had begun to lose the thrifty habits he had once had, growing tired of the relentless culling and resolution that the material world demanded. Easier to let it pile up, waiting for the great winnowing of goods that his death would bring.  

p.440 The trumpets sound the end of the revels. The baseless fabric begins to disintegrate. The stuff that dreams are made of starts to rend and tear and the walls of a cloud-capped tower tremble. 

A God in Ruins is not the page turner Kate Atkinson’s other book was for me. However, the characters are richly drawn and I liked Teddy a lot. She obviously did research because his time as a pilot on bomber runs was well written and thrillingly scary. Teddy’s time as a mortal man prove more difficult. Dealing with his very annoying daughter, he’s at a loss and misses his wife, Nancy, who dies far too soon. This book is a leisurely read. I like a book that’s intelligent (albeit, maybe a tad stodgy). This won’t be for everyone, but I’m a Kate Atkinson fan.

 

Book Review: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

I loved Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. It's a book to read in huge chunks because you can't get enough of it, and you savor the writing and the characters. And when it ends, you close it reluctantly, relishing an excellent tale.

In 1910, Ursula Todd is born and then she dies. But then in the next section, she's born and lives. As she grows, she also dies, repeatedly and the story moves forward to World War II. I like time travel types of stories and can suspend belief as to how it could happen. From the book blurb - Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can, will she? 

Atkinson's rich writing, her plot twists and turns, and her humor shine through Ursula.

P. 4  It's November 1930. A move rehearsed a hundred times. One shot. Swiftness was all, yet there was a moment, a bubble suspended in time after she had drawn the gun and leveled it at his heart when everything seemed to stop.

P. 7 February 1910  An icy rush of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin. She is, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical world has suddenly evaporated. Exposed to the elements. A pawn peeled, a nut shelled.

No breath. All the world come down to this. One breath. ......
Panic. The drowning girl, the falling bird.

You, the reader, will hold a breath as each chapter unfolds. Will Ursula thrive and move onward? Or will something happen to her, and you start over again? Layers build satisfactorily and you are transported to a sweeping time of history.

Life After Life is a stunning novel.