Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

March 7th 2019. The Packhorse, Southstoke, Bath. 

Set during three time periods in the 1940s working for MI5 as a secretary, the 1950s working in the BBC and the 1980s looking back on life this story builds into a spy thriller set during a  time when allies, enemies and allegiances changed and it was difficult to know who to trust…
General consensus of an easy read by all with some finding  rather irritating and shallow and others enjoying the details of postwar England and the activities of M16.

Richard
Easy to read but irritating-too many problems. No character development in the main character with the denouement extremely irritating -absolutely no hint at all that Juliet had any political convictions at all never mind that she might be working for the communist party.
Juliet was a non person-the world passed her by -she was SO dumb.
There were good bits the author’s ability to deal with prejudice rang very true “it must be awfully handy to have a scapegoat for the worlds ills. (Women and the Jews tend to be first in line, unfortunately)“ some of the quotes ring very true for the current debate about Europe and foreigners.
A Very forgettable book.

Chris B
Easy to read but extremely light. The characters were mildly interesting but no real detailed explanations or sophistication in Juliet’s character. The book rather trivialised the war and the Cold War - a bit of a caricature. The British Secret Service for example- that there would be the inevitable closet gay.

Willm
Enjoyed good quality writing, light but unbelievable. Implausible that Juliet could be the sleuth whilst being a typist. Many too many chance coincidences. Meeting in the fog, being found on Paddington Station, everybody knew where she was all the time-totally unbelievable. The twist at the end was “cute“ but there was no substantiation for why this should happen at all leading up to her having Communist leanings.

Andrew 
A dull start with the description of her childhood but the writing crisp and entertaining with an easy “floaty“ style. The mundanities of life are well described in the book. The book lost it pace in the middle section with way too many coincidences. Farcical meetings. And then suddenly at the end Juliet becomes a Communist! Andrew enjoyed the story and the writing. But didn’t fully engage him. It was nice to read but “thin”.

Mark T
Mark read the book in India and enjoyed it as a light-hearted read but the fact that he can’t remember it now is a reflection of his thoughts of the book. He felt that there were many parts that were tedious. The description of Juliets mother dying was well described and he enjoyed the tension when Juliet is hiding in Mrs Skaifes’s house hanging off the creeper outside the window!

John
This was a book following in the great tradition of “derring do“spy stories about M15 typical of the spy thrillers written by CJ Samson. It was not pretending to be more. Captured the era well particularly the description of life at the BBC.
Prejudices at the time against women, Jews and race were done well by the author and the issue of trust-who do we trust was well questioned. It was an easy read a “warm bath“ and touched on some very relevant issues for example appeasement- the fact  that prior to the Second World War Lord Halifax and others nearly did a deal with the Nazis.………

Mark W
An easy read but not very much happened during the first hundred pages and the last 50 went mad! The central character isn’t the “shaper” of the story. This is a novel written by a female author about a female without that individual being the lead role. He found the plot “clunky“ and that it was full of irritating asides expressed by Juliet in parentheses.
At the end the author decided she needed to cram in some exciting stuff so the last 50 pages are inexplicably full of plot.

Steve
There are numerous irritating errors the first being the reference to North Utsire which only came into the shipping forecast in the 1980s! However, he felt that he was drawn into the story and enjoyed it.He felt that it was cunningly written and he liked the character of Juliet- an abandoned orphan.
He particularly liked Juliet’s asides and felt that this was a persuasive account of how things would have been in post war MI5. With the basic logistics of one room next to the next filled with a typist and technician.
He found the story where later Juliet went on to become a double agent as being plausible and thought-provoking.
Well researched and believable book.
Terrific.

Chris W
Enjoyed the atmospheric writing bringing to life 40s and 50s England and details about MI5 work with Nazi sympathisers during the war. The book was good in that it raised questions about truth, patriotism, identity and self. There were numerous good quotes.
However on the downside there were very predictable stereotypical characters-public schoolboy spies with the standard closet homosexual. The book had large sections that were slow moving with little action. Difficult to connect with Juliet‘s character particularly with her irritating asides in parentheses. Very little justification at the end to explain Juliet becoming a double agent.


Scores

Richard 3.5
Steve 8.5
Andrew 6.5
Mark T 6 .8
Mark W 6 .5
Willm 6.0
John 7.0
Chris B 5 .5
Chris W 6 .6

Milkman by Anna Burns

Milkman by Anna Burns

Date of Meeting: Thursday 4^th April 2019

This book was picked because of its interesting first chapter, and was described by the Guardian as ‘original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique: different’. It was also the Booker Prize winner for 2018, not usually a selling point for me, but it seemed the sort of book that would not be described as ‘an easy read’ and so it transpired.

The discussion was an interesting one: there were three camps: ‘the enjoyed it’ camp, the ‘hated it camp’ and the Richard camp.

Dealing with the ‘hated it’ camp first of all, (Mark T and John), it seemed that Mark T, who was the first to comment, ‘passionately hated it’ and it was ‘one of the worst books I’ve ever read’, and he gave up at the end of the second chapter (roughly 20% of the book). However, after listening to the next four reviews, was heard to say ‘well perhaps I should have persevered a bit longer’, until sustained by John, who ‘found it unreadable’ and felt ‘angry and disenfranchised’, and gave up at roughly the same time as Mark T.

Mark W, in his brief introduction to the book, was struck by the style of the writing, strange at first but quite soon didn’t notice and was able to ‘go with the flow’. And what a flow it was, written entirely from the perspective of the narrator, whose name we never learn. According to the author herself, ‘This is a book about rumours, gossip, the power of gossip, the power of history and also the power of fabricated history, when rumours become the history’. Among the many quotes that could have been pulled out, two in particular were nominated, illustrating the dark humour of the book.

 Firstly, when describing an encounter with the ‘Wee Sisters’ (aged 8, 9 and 10 and never named, like all of the characters and places in the book):

‘I came in that day and we found them, no longer deep in Joan but now at those papers. ‘Wee sisters!’ we cried. ‘Where’d you get these? What on earth is going on?’ ‘Hush, older sisters,’ they said. ‘We’re busy. We’re trying to understand their viewpoint.’ After that they returned to poring over their broadsheets and tabloids while we, their elder sisters, disbelievingly looked on. Then we looked at each other –me, third sister, second sister and first sister. Trying to understand their viewpoint! What obscurity would wee sisters utter next? As for their remark, it was of the type that instantly could taint any person in our area.’

The second quote follows a difficult conversation with ‘Longest Friend’:

‘After this our meeting in the lounge ended, and after that I had three further encounters with longest friend from primary school. One was at her wedding in the countryside four months on where I was the only one – bar the holy man officiating – not wearing dark glasses. Even the groom, and longest friend in her simple white gown, each had a pair on. Then I met her a year after her wedding, this time at the funeral of her husband. Three months further on from that I went to her own funeral when they buried her with her husband. This was in the renouncers’ plot of the graveyard just up from the ten minute area, also known as ‘the no-town cemetery’, ‘the no-time cemetery’, ‘the busy cemetery’ or just simply, the usual place’.

Overall, Mark W ranked this book alongside Olive Ketteridge and The Handmaid’s tale, in terms of originality and enjoyment.

Next was Andrew, who was pleased this book about The Troubles was chosen, particularly against the backdrop of the Brexit backstop and watching Derry Girls on TV, and, up to a point he really enjoyed it. He thought it gave a real flavour of enclave life, with all its unspoken rituals and conventions and subtexts and rules and un-named people and things, its obfuscation and shadows, its expectations and resilience and fear and its pressure to conform and tensions and suspicions. Also, its ways of doing things and ways of not doing things, its constraints and strictures, its avoidance of hospitals, and telephones, and authorities, its use of rumour as a weapon, like with the Bentley supercharger and Middle Sister’s association with Milkman. The inescapable interconnectedness of everyone and everything, between as well as within communities, and all this from the perspective of an 18-year old woman who was doing all the things 18-year olds do anywhere, but in the confines of this enclave.

The start was excellent with its immediate hints of sinister things afoot, and was straight into the rhythm of the language. He listened to a section on Audible in the car but he had already got the voice and the rhythm from the writing. He liked the way characters were given descriptive names e.g. Maybe Boyfriend and Real Milkman, as well as places e.g. the Ten-Minute Area and the dot-dot-dot places. And he liked the characters, particularly Middle Sister, Ma, Real Milkman and the Wee Sisters. He also liked the way Burns introduced characters e.g. Chef and Real Milkman, and quickly got a real feel of how he became known as the man who didn’t love anybody. He enjoyed the way the story moved seamlessly between topics e.g. from hoarding to how Maybe-Boyfriend’s parents left four children without warning or note to live abroad and become world-famous ballroom dancers. He enjoyed the language e.g’ reading-while-walking, romance-advancement plan, hedge-disparagement, not going to hospital, guardians of the names, my mother, one of the Top Five pious women of the district, and Faithful Terror Of Other People And Not Just On Difficult Days.

While he enjoyed the language, that and the long sentences didn’t make it easy to read, and it was a long book. He found that trying to read it fast didn’t work and it was hard to keep the thread if he skimmed it and at times like walking across a ploughed field, until he slowed down and went with the flow, and enjoyed the language again.

Overall, he liked the story, its plot, its rhythm, its language, its characters, but it wasn’t an easy read unless you allowed yourself to fall into its rhythm.

Two quotes:

‘The only time you’d call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them, and naturally they would know this and so wouldn’t come’.

‘Three times in my life I’ve wanted to slap faces and once in my life I’ve wanted to hit someone in the face with a gun. I did do the gun but I have never slapped anybody’.

Steve, our resident Irish expert, was next, and, as expected found the book very interesting, but hadn’t quite finished it. He had highlighted so many things: firstly the book was very much in the tradition of Irish literature with its stream of consciousness from the head of the 18 year old girl. It was important to buy in to the narrative and the long sentences in order get something out of the book. It was a very different and gave a feeling about how extraordinary it must have been to grow up in Belfast during the Troubles. It’s still affected even nowadays. One of the issues he found interesting was about the place of women in the society. He also learned lots of phrases and particularly enjoyed the etiquette of getting off the phone. He was really enjoying it but it was not an easy read. He was certainly intending to finish it.

Subsequent to the meeting, after finishing the book, Steve added that, having finished it, he expected it to stay with him for much longer than some efforts by more established authors that we have read in the past.

Willm was next and found it to be a very original book, a stream of consciousness, all her experiences, thoughts, feelings, pouring out in a tense and impassioned manner. It was a powerful evocation of a whole community dominated by often unspoken rules, deliberate blindness and bounded rationality. The way everyone’s life is curtailed, scripted by their cognitive limitations and the structures of the environment (as is our own of course, but theirs is extreme).

She illustrates their bounded mental state throughout - ‘le ciel est bleu’ or black or white; no sunsets; no trees; semtex is normal, reading while walking is not. The district appears to be very working-class and yet, very strangely, she writes the speech of others with a form of words only available to highly educated, highly expressive, emotionally balanced people. He asked himself, throughout, why has she done this? Why not report in the vernacular, the voice of the people? This was, obviously, a deliberate choice. Was it because she wanted to get across to us, the readers, the complications, the complexity, the fractal-like nature of this societal structure, created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop? And that this would not have been available to us, at least not fully, in what he imagined to be the sparse and spare, emotionally-charged, language of the local population.

She told us parts of the future from the start, Milkman being killed, Somebody McSomebody threatening her with a gun; then a bit later that she breaks up with Maybe-Boyfriend, so obviously he survives. However these disclosures do not interfere with the experience of tension and threat that follows. A couple of times he felt ‘this is going on a bit too much’, with its sense of repetition, but he decided that this also reflected her experience of the never-ending harassment, the rumours, the blame, the cruelty. As a reader he needed to also experience the boredom of constant curtailment. Overall he was very impressed by its originality, descriptive power, and language.

Chris W started by thinking that there was no way he was going to be able to cope with the book. Like others, he found the first 15-20 pages quite hard, but, like others, he gradually got into it. He found himself reading it with his own Irish accent and just became addicted to it because, once he got into it, found it easy to follow and understand. It was a very convincing portrayal of the mind of an 18 year old girl, with the undercurrent of fear, and the feeling of somebody always watching what you were doing. Her life was torn apart by being stalked by someone, against whom she was unable to defend herself, resulting in a state of permanent fear. He found himself wanting to keep reading. He enjoyed the portrayal of the Wee Sisters, and the contrast between their intellect on the one hand and their more down to earth craving for chips on the other. He also loved the Blower Bentley scene, with its sudden change of mood from the feeling of enthusiasm and pride of Maybe Boyfriend having acquired the supercharger of the old car to the fear when one of the neighbours says :

‘It’s all very well, neighbour, having this so-called classic bit and all, and it’s not like I’m trying to be funny or anything but, which among you at the garage then drew the bit with that flag on’

Like others, Chris W noted that he couldn’t read this book quickly, but really enjoyed the depth in the main character.

Chris B liked the book. He thought that it was inventive and different but disagreed with some of the others in that he thought it was cleverer than a standard stream of consciousness. The author allowed the narrator to be extremely clever, with many variations, and layers of what’s actually going on. The style of the book lent itself so well to the locked-in community in which her only escape was in her reading of 19^th century novels, because she ‘didn’t like the 20^th century’ and to her French class which didn’t actually do much French.

He felt that, although the setting was clearly in Northern Ireland, the society could have been applied to many places, even an English village. He likes how the author defined the characters through the views of other people, for example the person who had become known as the ‘Man Who Didn’t Love Anybody’, aka the Real Milkman, turned out to be one of the kindest people about.

Chris B also hadn’t finished the book, but was very keen to finish it as he was looking forward to the denoument. He wondered whether a bit more context would have added more to the book, but he loved the psychology in which, in this closed society, what you really think is kept hidden.

Finally to Richard, who lulled us into a false sense of security with his opening statement that it was interesting to listen to the different perspectives, and that there were a lot of very good things about the book but that, for him, the book was much less than the sum of its parts. He compared it to ‘The Sellout’ in that it was erudite, interesting stuff.

He thought that the book had a very good beginning but he went off it. He thought it captured the Northern Irish turn of phrase although some of it sounded like Yoda from Star Wars! It was written in a very self-assured way, particularly the scenes with Maybe Boyfriend and the Blower Bentley and the French Class. He found the discussion about names very interesting, where there is a committee keeping a list of disallowed names. He also found it interesting that the Milkman surname doesn’t seem to be very common compared to many other trades.

He got the gender politics really well (as I type I am hearing Richard’s voice saying the words!), for example, the fact that women are not allowed to buy drinks. He thought that the book got the politics of the oppressed really well, the feeling of being browbeaten by the British armed forces, (something that it is difficult for us to appreciate on ‘our side of the water).

As well as ‘The Sellout’ Richard was also reminded of ‘The File’, where it seemed that everyone had a file on them, as in Eastern Germany. He appreciated the humour, the style and the enlightenment, but he really hated it. He didn’t enjoy the flow of words and he felt it went on and on, like a tsunami. It left him feeling exhausted. In the end, he had to really force himself to finish the book.

So, overall, an interesting discussion, and my reflection is that of feeling satisfied that no one described the book as ‘an easy read’ so one objective was achieved! Apologies to the three of you that really didn’t like it, more because two out of the three in particular didn’t get very far and so were unable to make the most of this discussion. I am pleased that most of the Book Club enjoyed the book, as I did; it was certainly not a foregone conclusion from the first few pages!

Scores as follows:

Mark W 8.5, Mark T 2.0, Andrew 8.0, Steve 8.5, Willm 9.5, Chris W 8.7, John 2.0, Richard 3.0, Chris B 8.2.