Fans of Kate Atkinson know better than to expect a straightforward chronological narrative from her; instead, she prefers to jump around, intensifying the poignancy of her characters’ lives by giving her readers godlike glimpses of how they will eventually turn out. The very first page of “Transcription” opens with protagonist Juliet Armstrong’s death, aged 60, in 1981; she’s hit by a car as London and the world watch while a “sacrificial virgin was being prepared” for a fateful royal wedding – a death we witness with different emotions when we return to the scene briefly at the very end of the novel

Then there’s a flashback to 1950, when Juliet was a producer in the Schools programmes at the BBC. She thinks she sees someone from a decade before. In the “great web that stretched across time and history,” Juliet is certain that she has spotted Godfrey Toby. Toby was her contact in a surveillance trap during WWII, when they exposed members of a Fifth Column. Together, “they had committed a hideous act.” It takes the rest of the novel to reveal what that act was

Skip back ten years further and it’s 1940, during the Phoney War. Juliet is recently orphaned: the death of her mother, an invalid, strips her of her roles as caretaker, as family hope, as a person who thrives in the light of someone else’s love: “Juliet had stopped going to that school, stopped preparing for that bright future, so that she could care for her mother—there had always been only the two of them—and had not returned after her mother’s death. It seemed impossible somehow. . . . That girl, transmuted by bereavement, had gone. And, as far as Juliet could tell, she had never really come back”

At the age of eighteen, Juliet has no attachments, and feels that she herself is nobody. As war approaches, she applies to join the Women’s Armed Forces but is instead summoned to a job in the burgeoning secretarial pool of M.I.5, the British domestic counter-intelligence agency. Juliet does well enough in the pool to be removed from it and chosen for a special operation, one involving what passes, in 1940, for high-tech surveillance. Godfrey Toby is an M.I.5 agent who is posing, in London society, as a German government agent; the agency sets him up in a flat where he can entertain his fellow Fifth Columnists, with a group of its own employees secretly installed in the flat next door. Microphones are implanted behind the plaster of the common wall; what they capture is engraved onto a wax record, and these records are transcribed by Juliet

Her task is to sort out relevant information from a group that includes Dolly (a laundry worker certain she can deduce troop deployments by the arrival and departure of military uniforms); her friend, Betty (trapped in an unhappy marriage); Edith (a dressmaker who patrols the English Channel during daily clifftop walks in Brighton); Trude (a “rather peevish and controlling Norwegian…with contacts all over Britain”); Victor (a machinist with access to secret blueprints); and Walter (a naturalised German who “knew a great deal about tracks and trains and timetables”). Then there’s Dolly’s dog, Dib, who plays a pivotal role in the plot

The work, like most such work, seems vital at first but proves to be largely mundane. While Allied troops are being routed in Europe and Londoners begin to prepare for the worst, Juliet duly records every conversation about the weather, pets, etc., on the other side of the wall. The occupants of the M.I.5 flat must stay quiet and hidden, as best they can; they are a small crew, of which Juliet is the only female member (as such, she is reflexively asked to make tea, empty ashtrays—women’s work). Their boss is a handsome career spy with the superbly British name of Peregrine Gibbons. Perry, as he is known, takes a particular interest in Juliet, and that interest soon begins to blur the line between the professional and the personal. Not that Juliet is made uncomfortable by Perry’s attentions. Mostly, she is confused by the way they skirt the edge of the sexual but never really cross the line – to Juliet’s chagrin, for she is genuinely attracted to Perry and also curious about the world of sex itself. What happens instead, quite unexpectedly and thrillingly for her, is that a different line is crossed: Perry taps Juliet to become an active part of the undercover Fifth Column operation rather than just a transcriber of it

She is given a new name, Iris Carter-Jenkins, and tasked with befriending a horrible Jew-hating dowager named Mrs. Scaife.  She is also given a gun, one that fits in her handbag. The details of Iris’s personal life – she has a Scottish fiancé named Ian, for instance, who is a lieutenant on H.M.S. Hood – are scripted by Perry, though he does give Juliet room to improvise as she sees fit. “It can be a difficult concept,” he warns her, “fabricating a life – the falsehoods and so on. Some people find it challenging to dissemble in this way.” But Juliet takes to this subterfuge easily – the notion of altering one’s identity, one’s persona, in order to adapt to the role of the moment is for women, the novel gently suggests, a kind of learned social reflex

Juliet is a rousing success as Iris; in no time at all, she is inside Mrs. Scaife’s home, taking tea and trading anti-Semitic banter. At one point, to avoid exposure, she must escape a house through an upstairs window, and she summons the courage to do so by reminding herself that “Iris was the plucky sort.” Indeed, when further exigencies arise, she proves capable of assuming other identities on the fly, as if it were second nature to her—because it is. At the same time, she is enlisted to keep an eye on Toby, in essence becoming a double agent

When the story returns to 1950, it shifts into high gear. England’s new conflict is with Russia – an old enemy that became a friend and then an enemy again. Here, Juliet’s past pursues her. She seems unable to escape the consequences of a yet-undisclosed horror that occurred a decade before. Anonymous notes surface. New adversaries appear. Juliet is dragged into providing a safe house for asylum seekers

Transcription stretches over four decades, never losing sight of its overriding theme exemplified by the story of Daedalus and Icarus – the perfect plot. Icarus, “of course had flown too high and fallen. In some ways it was the only plot.” Atkinson keeps well the secret of who here is Daedalus and who is Icarus

Her narrative is clever and serious but also with the element of Atkinson’s trademark humour. Juliet, with an “inclination to levity,” often silently comments on her adversaries. At one point, she has an outing with otters that looks as though it’s going to be a scene of seduction. And there is a comic fiasco of farcical proportions that becomes tragic

At every point, however, it is clear that lying is the foundation of Juliet’s character. She understands that “if you’re going to tell a lie, tell a good one”

Kate Atkinson is a masterful manipulator of lies. Transcription is a spectacular game of deception, her own perfect plot. It is as twisty and efficient — everything falls into place like the tumblers of a combination lock — as the best of Le Carré