![]() ![]() The novel demonstrates Atkinson’s masterful storytelling-this is an exquisitely crafted literary thriller partly inspired by the story of Eric Roberts, an MI5 officer who spent the war masquerading as a member of the Gestapo to trick British fascists into revealing their treachery. ![]() Transcription goes deeper into the role of MI5 during the war to explore the personal cost of subterfuge and espionage during the period. Having read several of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie crime novels, I was looking forward to getting stuck into Transcription, the third in her trio of novels set in World War Two London which includes Life After Life and A God in Ruins. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.” The Sympathizer is brilliant. The Janus-like nature a spy’s character, the moral ambiguity of which the novel works to reflect back to the reader, is captured succinctly in the opening lines: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. This novel is mind-blowingly good, a pyrotechnic demonstration of style, mashing up a range of fictional genres, including mystery, meta-fiction, comedy and, of course, espionage. Chau’s rich, mellifluous voice gives a wearied yet determined detachment to this story of a North Vietnamese mole, who after the fall of Saigon remains embedded a South Vietnamese community in exile in the United States. I say “read”, but in fact I first consumed this Pulitzer-Prize winning novel in audio, with Francois Chau narrating, which is an absolute delight. I have never anything quite like The Sympathizer. Boyd presents the reader with a complex, resilient, brave and fallible lead character, one who challenges the traditional masculine space of literary espionage. The novel deftly weaves two timelines-wartime London and 1970s Oxford-to bring about a fascinating moral reckoning. This emotional cataclysm drives her through a story that is full of energy, pace, as well as fascinating psychological insights into what made spies tick. Boyd’s enigmatic Eva is a Russian recruited to the British intelligence service after her beloved brother’s death on the brink of the Second World War. This novel inspired me to really plumb the depths of the psyche of a female spy. As I immersed myself in these places, conjuring character, events and the specific historical era, I read some influential novels to lend flavour to my journey and add inspiration to the writing process. This ‘work’ (though, happily, it never really felt like that) took me to London, Oxford and other sites in the UK, visiting archives, museums, houses, pubs and parks. With Europe in flux, what were the protagonist spies busy doing? And how did those reflect the passions and fears of their creators?Īuthors discussed include Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Rex Warner ( The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor), Eric Ambler ( The Dark Frontier, Uncommon Danger, A Coffin for Dimitrios) and Geoffrey Household ( Rogue Male).Having decided I wanted to write about a young female spy in London on the brink of World War Two, I knew I’d be taking a deep dive into research for the project. In this episode, Jacke talks to scholar and journalist Juliette Bretan about the issues at work in the spy novels of the 1930s. And while it came to be identified with the Cold War, thanks to Fleming and subsequent writers like John le Carré, thriller aficionados continued to look back to earlier authors for novels with a different set of stakes. ![]() The British spy novel was well established long before Ian Fleming’s creation of James Bond in the 1950s. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today? Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. ![]()
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