BOOKS | Reviews
FICTION KATE ATKINSON Transcription (Doubleday) ●●●●●
Following on from the award-winning Life After Life (2013) and A God in Ruins (2015), Atkinson revisits WWII in Transcription. She has a new hero, however, in the complicated and contradictory Juliet Armstrong. Reluctantly recruited by MI5 aged 18, Juliet is as naïve as she is canny, as prone to wise-cracking as she is careful with her words. As always, Atkinson leaves much for her readers
to decode and as Juliet spends her youth transcribing the conversations of British Fascist sympathisers, the reader is just as keenly searching for double meanings and revelations. In Juliet’s records, anecdotes about the weather are interposed with imagined gossip about the Gestapo, a juxtaposition that’s only made more complex by the revelation that she occasionally allows herself to fill in words or phrases inaudible in the recordings.
Over the course of the war, Juliet transitions from glorified typist
to undercover agent but it’s in the 1970s, when she’s working for the BBC, that she discovers what it really means to become embroiled in a world of complicity and co-conspiracy. Atkinson’s talent for creating a sense of levity and playfulness
that’s subtly subverted really comes into its own in Transcription. Trust no one, her narrative suggests, least of all yourself. The mundane nature of Juliet’s tasks conceals the severity of the situations she allows herself to become embroiled in, much in the same way that Atkinson’s seamless yet ingenious prose lulls the reader into an assumption of understanding, only to tug at the rug beneath their feet. Transcription is another absorbing read from one of our most inventive writers. (Lynsey May) ■ Out Thu 6 Sep.
FICTION CLAIRE ASKEW All the Hidden Truths (Three Rivers) ●●●●●
In All the Hidden Truths, a novel set in the aftermath of a mass shooting at a fictional Edinburgh college, prize-winning poet Claire Askew delivers a compelling crime debut that tackles difficult questions with compassion and aplomb.
Told from the perspective of Moira, mother to Ryan Summers (the perpetrator who kills himself at the scene), Ishbel, mother of Abigail (his first victim), and Helen Birch, the DI assigned to the case, the novel follows three women who are desperately and doggedly searching for a version of the truth they can live with. As tabloid reporters descend to pick over the scant and brutal facts available, family secrets are in danger of being exposed. But no matter what details are dug up, the reality remains that Ryan shot himself – and dead men don’t talk, even when their actions scream.
NON-FICTION DAVID STUBBS Mars By 1980: The Story Of Electronic Music (Faber & Faber) ●●●●●
Mars By 1980 takes its title from a 1970s newspaper headline. Today, such space-age idealism seems quaint, even melancholy; a remnant of a lost future. In surveying the history of electronic music, music journalist David Stubbs aims to rediscover ‘not merely a glow of nostalgia but the glow of possible dormant futures that have merely been deferred.’ Stubbs sketches a fascinating pre-history of electronic instruments, from Jesuit priest Jean- Baptiste Delaborde’s 1759 clavecin électrique to Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium of 1893, yet also contends that the evolution of electronic music is not purely down to technology, but a confluence of socio-economic factors, imagination and ingenuity. While he does not attempt a comprehensive overview of dance music, Stubbs is particularly engaging on subjects close to his heart.
Don’t expect to find any easy answers in this The avant-garde tape compositions of Karlheinz
skilful whydunnit. Instead, Askew opens up important conversations about toxic masculinity, guilt, grief and how, as a society, we face up to and deal with public tragedies and their painful aftermaths. Moving from character to character, Askew creates a fragmented yet cohesive story that leaves the reader feeling as compromised, torn and compelled to re-evaluate assumptions of victimhood as her protagonists. (Lynsey May) ■ Out now.
54 THE LIST 1 Sep–31 Oct 2018
Stockhausen and Pierre Henry are often seen as forbidding and cerebral, but in Stubbs’ vivid prose, they come alive. Meanwhile, his personal reflections on the transitional period between disco and acid house capture a fertile time. At its best, Stubbs argues, electronic music has ‘opened up great vistas of possibility’. No golden- ager, Stubbs recognises that today’s innovations are led by women, LGBT people and artists of colour. The future is not yet lost. (Stewart Smith) ■ Out now.
FICTION AMBROSE PARRY The Way of All Flesh (Canongate) ●●●●●
Dispensing with the cagey Robert Galbraith school of taking pseudonyms, Ambrose Parry has been upfront from the beginning. ‘He’ is the pen-name of married couple Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman. While the authoring game is Brookmyre’s trade, this
‘debut’ novel for Parry seems to have come more from Haetzman’s interests and specialisms. A consultant anaesthetist in the NHS for twenty years, she also has a Master’s degree in the History of Medicine, in which she studied the early use of anaesthesia.
This forms the backdrop to The Way of All Flesh,
a Victorian crime thriller set in 1847 which bears elements of comparison to similarly murderous artefacts of Victoriana as the Burke and Hare murders or Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. There are two protagonists here, as there are two writers; in the beginning, new medical student Will Raven, and subsequently housemaid Sarah Fisher, both in the employ of the real-life Doctor James Simpson. Young women are being murdered in violent circumstances, and the pair are drawn into the hunt. As with each of Brookmyre’s books, the thriller aspect is only part of the fun. The narrative style involves a crisp Victorian tone and a thread of black humour woven throughout; the sense of an Edinburgh socially and geographically developing into the one we know now adds extra flavour to a foot-finding first instalment in what has the potential to become a series. (David Pollock) ■ Out now.