There, her mission is to find a book listing the Right Club’s members. But in Transcription, Atkinson expands Juliet’s role in the mission beyond typist: she eventually goes undercover into the Right Club, a small group of antisemitic and fascist sympathizing renegades. Their conversations are contained, recorded, and then transcribed-by Juliet.
She is recruited out of school by MI5 to work on a special mission very much like Roberts’s: an MI5 officer posing as a Nazi agent hosts British Fascists in an apartment. Says Atkinson in her Author’s Note: “There is no record in the public domain of who typed them-it seems to be mainly one person (a ‘girl’, obviously)-and as I spent a period of my life as an audio typist I felt an odd affinity with this anonymous typist, especially when, on the off occasion, her own personality breaks suddenly through.” The technology for recording was not as advanced as it is now there were, one could imagine, many gaps in the conversation that needed to be filled in.Ītkinson had begun this project with the agent Roberts but found herself becoming more and more intrigued by the person transcribing these conversations.
These meetings were then transcribed into documents over a hundred pages for the records of British intelligence.
He had posed as a Gestapo agent during the war, renting an apartment where he would meet regularly with British Fascists and various sympathizers who confided in Roberts with nefarious plots and plans. Kate Atkinson’s inspiration for her latest novel Transcription initially came from a document released by the National Archives detailing the work of a WW2 agent known as “Jack King.” “Jack” was Eric Roberts, an outwardly pedestrian bank clerk who, in secret, worked for MI5 to infiltrate Fascist circles.
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