![]() Atkinson is a masterful narrative strategist, linking her two stories by the appearance in Juliet’s postwar world of figures from her MI5 days and the suggestion that she is now at risk for what happened then. ![]() Often, when writers attempt to tell two related but different stories, the reader picks a favorite and loses interest in the other. What happens in 1940 to change Juliet’s view of the world is revealed gradually, as Atkinson jumps from wartime London to 1950 and Juliet’s postwar life as a radio producer for the BBC. In 1940, during the “phony war,” 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is a well-read, if somewhat naive, young woman, “more concerned with the introduction of meat rationing” than with the coming of the real war, “the one where you might be killed.” Even her work, transcribing conversations between an MI5 agent and various fifth columnists, seems oddly unthreatening, given the dim-witted ordinariness of these comically British would-be traitors, obsessed with their numerous “biscuit breaks.” But then, suddenly, it doesn’t seem ordinary anymore. ![]() As in her sublime Life after Life(2013), Atkinson again jumps between different periods in the mid-twentieth century to tell the story of a singular Englishwoman trapped in the vice of history. ![]()
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