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Average customer rating 3.3 (3 comments)

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I finished it last night and loved it! Complex, entertaining, historical and darkly funny. A character with the unlikely name of Peregrine Gibbons is a new literary favorite of mine.

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Hitler was collecting countries like stamps. How long before he had the full set? This is a snapshot of history inspired by a series of transcripts the author discovered. In fact there is one line in the book uttered by Juliet which sums up this novel for me : “History should always have a plot …. How else could you make sense of it?” For Juliet is recruited into the world of spies and intrigue with MI5 and her job is to transcribe meetings between an agent working under cover as a Fifth Columnist and the various fascist agents he comes into contact with. This is a fascinating part of history and one I’d not really heard that much about. Entering this world and seeing it through the eyes of the various players was a treat and you can feel the research and author interest oozing off the page. Never does it get in the way of the story though – that’s Atkinson’s trademark after all – top class research, complex issues and an easy to read treat of a novel. What made this novel for me was the humour – wry and caustic at times – “‘Hypocaustum from the Ancient Greek – hypo meaning beneath and caust burnt. Which word do you think we get from that?’ ‘I have no idea,’ she said, caustically.” Linguists will love this – word play, editorial jokes and those war time transcripts which fuel the behind the scenes of wartime. I’ve transcribed many meeting notes myself as a translator but never quite as interesting as these. To have them dotted throughout the novel, in a different font and set out as if they were inserts in a history book, is also something history buffs in particular will appreciate. It all works really really well even if I did think Juliet seemed very naive for working in the foreign office and for …well life in general at times. There wasn‘t quite enough novel to go round either – so much complexity there, research, war time intrigue but I felt the novel was too short and I was left feeling there should have been more. It was fourth gear rather than fifth. Kindle or e-readers should perhaps be prepared to take a few notes as the timeline does move around and flip back and forth quite a bit and with the transcripts too, it might be tricky to keep track of some threads. Don’t be tempted to read the author note beforehand though as that’s a story in itself! There’s so much scope in this world and I hope Kate Atkinson returns to it.

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Failure as literature, and failure as espionage. Beautiful cover, though.