The time-shifts in Transcription, while not necessarily confusing, tend instead to be uprooting, dismantling the reader’s interest just when things are getting good, not to mention the fact that, cumulatively, they stand as a glaring monument to authorial intrusion in a plot that would seem to tell itself. If all of this plot-work sounds over-determined, that’s because it is. Atkinson’s witty, functionally elegant style in Transcription isn’t terribly distinctive, but it isn’t trying to be the writing is always in service to the story. Compared to a Cusk or a Smith (Ali or Zadie), Atkinson might appear to be a sort of literary matron, an aesthetic conservative unwilling or unable to adapt to the evolution of her art but hers is a profoundly feminist project. Far from interfering with the plot of Transcription, this meditation on identity kindles it. before you know it Transcription has turned from a wartime spy yarn into a fuguelike meditation on the fungibility of female identity. In her best work-a category in which her latest, Transcription (Little, Brown), certainly belongs-she maneuvers the tropes of the murder-mystery genre, of historical fiction, and of privileged white Britishness into a kind of critical salvage of women’s work, women’s lives, that’s as heterodox, in its way, as Cusk’s. Atkinson has predicated her enormously successful career upon giving readers intelligent and artful iterations of what they already know they like. Within a deceptively familiar form, Transcription treats the lives and labor of women with fresh complexity.

Transcription kate atkinson review