Transcription by Kate Atkinson is both chilling and hilarious
London, 1940. Juliet Armstrong has a boring clerical job in "the Registry" at Wormwood Scrubs Prison, now headquarters of a burgeoning MI5. One day she's approached by Perry Gibbons, who introduces himself, saying "I need a girl, I'm afraid."
"Well...I am a girl, I suppose." This response reflects the author's trademark sheen of humour; Juliet's thoughts sharpen the comic tone. Impressed by his "firm voice, a nice low register that spoke of both kindness and unassailable authority in a man," she agrees to work for him. Not that she has much choice -- as her friend Clarissa puts it, after a desultory interview, "I think you've been plucked." And so Juliet joins a special operation and becomes a kind of clerical spy, transcribing the words of a group of fifth columnists who meet in the next door apartment to the operation's "office" in Dolphin Square.
Kate Atkinson conveys both characters and setting with devastating wit and power. Readers acquire insight into Juliet from her idle thoughts about word meanings and rhymes, and laugh when she learns that someone's husband is an actuary and wonders what that is, then decides it sounds "as if it belonged in a zoo, along with a cassowary and a dromedary." Learning that "Juliet and Hartley had long since abandoned manners with each other," and find it "refreshing to behave without respect towards someone," the reader absorbs a wealth of information about the social rules of the time. Then there is Juliet's touching but innocent hope that her boss might kiss her -- before she eventually clues in to the fact that he has no interest in women.
Sometimes the comedy takes on a darker hue, as with the sketch of the pilot Juliet had "briefly dated" during the war. When he lost a leg in a crash landing returning from a raid, "He made light of it, joked about it endlessly from his hospital bed (Not a leg to stand on, Pull the other one, and so on)." In the same sentence, we learn that "it ruined him and he gassed himself in his mother's kitchen after he was released from hospital," making Juliet "furious." Convinced that she would have stood by the one-legged pilot, she thinks of her other past lovers as "mistakes."
Long after the war Juliet is working for the BBC when she receives a threatening note saying she will pay for what she did. "Must I?" she wonders, sensing the "clumsily stitched wound" of her war service opening up again, and thinking the war "had thrown up plenty of unpaid debts -- why should she be the one being presented with the bill?" She also wonders who "is going to be next to pop out of the box" that is supposed to keep her past contained.
Astutely, she senses "some kind of osmotic membrane between the Corporation and the Service, employees moving from one world to the other without hindrance...Sometimes you had to wonder if MI5 was using the BBC for its own purposes. Or indeed, if it was the other way round." She also feels there is a "quasi-religious tone to the Corporation. Broadcasting House itself was dedicated to 'Almighty God,' as if [he] was looking down benevolently on the transmitters from the clouds." It occurs to her that this too might be a front.
The reader gets a clear sense of Juliet's character through her conversations with others as well as herself. When she and a doleful Prendergast discuss "isms," Juliet considers these: fascism, communism, and capitalism, then comments "We lose sight of the ideal that propelled them and yet millions die in defence of -- or attack on -- those beliefs." As well as being a clear thinker, Juliet has a high level of self-awareness, as when she observes herself feeling "slighted yet relieved," and thinks it "curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord."
The plot of the story hinges on this: who is using whom for what? Who is one of them and who is one of us? In a moment that combines horror and hilarity, Juliet finds herself in the Brompton Oratory with the dog of an absent spy, trying to keep out of sight of someone she thinks is "one of us." Yet he has just mysteriously handed something over to "the man in the astrakhan-collared coat," whom she has seen on a few occasions, and suspects may be "one of them." Obliged to hold the dog firmly and duck down twice to avoid being seen, she begins to feel "almost religious."
It's all very complicated. As Juliet concludes, people disappear from history, not by being erased, but by being "explained away."