There’s double cross and hidden lives and someone whose first wife was said to have come to an unhappy end. There are secrets and invisible ink, multiple identities, bodies to be disposed of and nothing is quite what it seems as loyalties and alliances are confused and confusing. “They are looking for girls like you” her headmistress had said, but without without specifying what sort that was.Īnd so Juliet is drawn into a world of fevered espionage. Juliet is recruited by MI5 straight from school. Emotional manipulation designed to undermine confidence and credibility. Gaslighting – a form of psychological abuse in which the victim is manipulated into doubting reality. A woman struggles to maintain her sanity as her husband works to undermine her sense of reality.
Menace and deception hang in the air like fog. After that initial chapter, the action switches forth and back between the drab austerity of London of 1950 and the anxious, uncertain, paranoid and fearful London of early 1940. The Germans the same - the great enemy, the worst of all of them, and now they were our friends, one of the mainstays of Europe. The Russians had been their enemies and then they were their allies, and then they were enemies again. And as far as this novel is concerned: “Twas ever thus. “‘This England’, she murmured” as she lies dying on the street. who – we learn in the first chapter – was run over in 1981 crossing Wigmore Street after listening to Shostakovitch in Wigmore Hall. (I love that little last line nod to Winnie the Pooh.) There was a better life somewhere, Juliet supposed, if only she could be bothered to find it.”- Kate Atkinson, Transcription.
‘For softening earwax?’ he asked when she handed over her money. The only olive oil she could find was sold in her local chemist in a small bottle. Recently she had bought a new book, by Elizabeth David - A Book of Mediterranean Food. The sandwich was no comfort, it was a pale limp thing a long way from the déjeuner sur l’herbe of her imagination. . .
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