Toby was her contact in a surveillance trap during WWII, when they exposed members of a Fifth Column. In the “great web that stretched across time and history,” Juliet is certain that she has spotted Godfrey Toby, a.k.a. She thinks she sees someone from a decade before. As she hovers between “the darkness and the daylight,” the novel flashes back to two key periods in her life.įirst, it jumps briefly to 1950, when Juliet was a producer in the Schools programs at the BBC. As London and the world watch while a “sacrificial virgin was being prepared” for a fateful royal wedding, Juliet is hit by a car and hospitalized. In the book’s brief opening section, set in 1981, Juliet Armstrong is 60 years old.

Atkinson’s novel centers on one particular character and functions primarily as an exploration of the world of espionage. Many of these circumstances and themes carry over into Transcription, which also focuses on 1940 but extends into several other decades. The women, on the other hand, are fully aware of their importance being in “anxious charge of five thousand recordings in use every week.” They establish a supportive relationship that gets them through affairs, harassment, pregnancies, deaths of war-bound boyfriends and husbands, and the general exigencies and vicissitudes of daily existence during the Blitz. She says she had not intended to use the British Broadcasting Corporation as background, thinking Fitzgerald had “cornered the market…in novels about the BBC during wartime.” Then she discovered there was “so much more material to be mined.”įitzgerald’s novel is set squarely in 1940, at a time when young employees “felt a certain pride scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe.” At a time when “ruth ensure trust, but not victory, or even happiness… Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth.” It was an “institution that could not tell a lie” when lies were ballast for survival.īehind the scenes in the dank basement bunkrooms of the BBC, a group of women, some as young as 16, are referred to as the Seraglio by a male-dominated workforce because the director of the Department of Recorded Programmes “found that he could work better when surrounded by young women.” In a closing author’s note, Atkinson credits Penelope Fitzgerald’s “gem of a novel” Human Voices with influencing the period and setting of her own novel.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson