This idea of consequences, and of every choice exacting a price later, runs like a watermark through T ranscription, as it did through its two predecessors. The second strand of the narrative, set in 1950, begins when Juliet – now working for the BBC – encounters Toby again, and his reappearance seems to trigger a series of reckonings for the lies she told during the war, and is possibly still telling. Toby (who is based on a historical character) is a shadowy, Prospero-like figure, often to be found emerging from the mist, whose fate becomes entangled with Juliet’s through unexpected tragedy. In 1940, Juliet is employed by MI5 to transcribe recordings of meetings in a bugged flat between a group of fascist sympathisers and a man named Godfrey Toby, whom the fifth columnists believe is a Gestapo agent but is actually a British spy monitoring his informers.

She remembered seeing Gaslight during the war.” In the aftermath of war, trying to locate the source of an anonymous threat, Juliet finds the multiple deceptions she has practised, and had practised upon her, accumulate to create a creeping paranoia in which “things are seldom what they seem”, as one man remarks, quoting Gilbert and Sullivan. Juliet is less obviously at the mercy of authorial tricks than Ursula Todd or her brother Teddy, respectively the protagonists of the previous two books, but the inventions she inhabits are created for her by others, mostly her male handlers at MI5, all of whom appear to be living fiendishly complex double or triple lives themselves.

But then what constituted real? Wasn’t everything, even this life itself, just a game of deception?” Atkinson’s great gift is for presenting the mundanity of ordinary life with wry detachment “And then there was Juliet Armstrong, of course, who some days seemed like the most fictitious of them all, despite being the ‘real’ Juliet. Recruited to the Secret Service at the beginning of the war, she has learned to shift between various names and personae. Juliet Armstrong has more than her share of such lies. Transcription continues this exploration of the lies and inventions that make up a life, particularly during a time when all prior certainties – including identity – have been upended. The second world war and the self-conscious tricks of fiction these are the twin themes that shaped her two most recent, award-winning books, Life After Life and A God in Ruins. We’re not approaching the end of a novel, Miss Armstrong,” says a minor character, as we approach the end of Kate Atkinson’s new novel. “Come now, quite enough of exposition and explanation.

Incarceron book 2