Margaret Atwood is having fun in this collection of short stories. A half dozen involve a long-married couple, Tig and Nell, and the rest include a Grimm’s fairy tale retold by an extraterrestrial, a story of reincarnation from the point of view of a snail, a gin-soaked reunion of old (female) friends, and others. Atwood is a fine writer, which is gratifyingly evident in the first few sentences of the first story. (I’ve been reading too many not-so-fine writers lately; Atwood was like settling into a first-class seat on the 20th Century limited after traveling miles on potholed roads).
The last of the Nell and Tig stories follow Nell’s grieving after Tig’s death. She is one of the few writers who can write about feelings without becoming sentimental. Highly recommend.
I wish I could have liked this better. I really enjoyed Kate Atkinson’s “life after life” and the early Jackson Brodie novels, and thought I had found a writer whose works were beautifully written, satisfying, and prolific.
Well, two out of three.
Judith Anderson, the protagonist of “Transcription, is a young woman drafted into a clerical position in Britain’s M15 spy corps during WWII, and then is “promoted” to being a transcriber of secretly recorded meetings between an M15 agent posing as a German spy and fascist sympathizers. These recordings short-circuit the passing of useful information about military installations and preparations to the Nazis, so they are theoretically a useful contribution to the war effort. But for the most part, the meetings are composed of long stretches of puerile conversation half-heard over the noise of traffic, paper rustling, a barking dog.
But “things are seldom what they seem”, as Gilbert and Sullivan are quoted by Judith’s boss. The book descends into a tangle of “coincidental” encounters, possible betrayals, shifting identities, pseudonyms, and a couple of quite unpleasant deaths.
Atkinson artsifies the plot by shifting the time back and forth. We see Judith in 1981, the victim of an apparent hit-and-run accident. Then we are in 1950, where Judith spies a former colleague from M15, who denies knowing her. And then we are in 1940, at the beginning of the war, and Judith is being reassigned to her transcription duties. We jump back between the war years and the post-war years several times. It’s a way to build suspense – we know that something horrible happened and want to find out what- but it’s not a way to build sympathy for Judith.
So I ended up admiring the technique, but not caring very much whether that hit-and-run was really an accident. Reading the reviews, I see the book is “laced with wit”. I wonder if I have an insufficient sense of humor? or maybe I sympathized a bit too much after all with Judith, preventing me from laughing at her predicaments.
Allyson Johnson 