Review: Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson

Our Noble Selves

Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 10 September 2026
Available as: HB, 352pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529937824

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Our Noble Selves to consider for review.

I have recently been listening to Kate Atkinson's earlier novel, Transcription, which has been dramatised for Radio 4. It's a story of wartime espionage and peacetime consequences, set between 1941 and 1951 and I was struck by athematic unity (at least in part) with Our Noble Selves.

The later book is set wholly during 1951 and is focussed on the Festival of Britain, which took place in that year, but it looks back to the war in two respects.

First, the main character, ex-journalist Harry Flynn, has landed up in his rather non-job as part of the team preparing the Festival after spending most of the War as a prisoner of the Japanese, working on the infamous Burma Railway. ('"Was it absolute hell?' Flynn shrugged. 'Others had it as bad.' He was thinking of Evans. Of almost every returning soldier since Troy and Thermopylae.' In the manner of his day and age, Flynn doesn't want to recall the horrors that he underwent, although they occasionally creep through in his dreams (he depends on drink to limit this) in something of the same manner as the flashbacks in Transcription. In her Afterword, Atkinson says that she originally intended to make more of these events but cut them back because she wanted to make the story lighter. It is true that it's lighter than Transcription, but I also feel that this choice fits better with the reality that such awful events were often ignored for decades.

It also fits with the whole ethos of the Festival - designed partly as an enormous party for a war-weary country, partly as a bold vision of the future, showcasing British living, manufactures, the Empire (as it still was) and modern design. Atkinson gives us extracts from Festival guides and maps, conveying the epic scale of the event and some of its subjects. The book is peppered with extracts from the catalogue of goods available, with supplier names and details. It's a fascinating glimpse into what now seems like a vanished culture.

The second overlap with Transcription is that while the action is set in the present (ie 1951) events are very much driven by unfinished business from the war. This is a time when everyone still wants to move on, to forget about it. (Though as Flynn shrewdly comments, 'A few years later and they start wanting to remember again. A few decades later and they're wallowing in it.') Yet, there are reputations to be protected, grudges to be satisfied, enmities and differences that still fester. Such things have a way of shaping events, as we will see.

An amusing feature of Harry Flynn is that he's apparently very attractive to women. While he doesn't really seem to understand that, he's willing to go along with it and, at the start of the book, he's found himself a wife - hoping to settle in a boring suburban home with his little family and their dog. The nightmares put paid to that, and one day, Flynn just walks out of an increasingly fractious relationship, eventually landing his job at the Festival. But the ladies still have an eye for him, and so when a woman working at the office disappears after meeting him, she's assumed to be 'Your French girlfriend', a misconception that he struggles against through most of the story.

Worse, Flynn comes under suspicion, the plot building up with coincidences, trickery and ever more-desperate attempts by Harry to clear his name by working out what really happened - in the teeth of the police, who see him as a wrong 'un, and a cast of washed-up war heroes (and some villains) of the sort who gradually pickled themselves in whisky in London bars though the late 40s and 50s. There are some truly dreadful people here, with dreadful secrets to persevere, who don't welcome Flynn's probing into their affairs. It makes for an effective thriller plot, leavened with humour and Atkinson's absolutely, steel-sharp observations of manners and gift for drawing character.

We also actually get quite a shrewd perspective on the Festival itself. Largely inaccessible to us now except through old guides and newspaper photographs, it is often portrayed in idealogical terms as a brave future vision - and of course there is that element. However Atkinson does gently show how much of what was on display was backward, not forward looking: the model rooms on show for example informed by class and gender prejudices which seem distinctly antediluvian to us now.

In all, Our Noble Selves (the title comes from a military toast and does rather capture the slightly self-satisfied tone which Atkinson imputes, whether fairly or not, to the Festival itself and the wider Britain of 1951) is a fun read, jostling with life and with characters who are a joy to spend time among. I'd strongly recommend it.

For more information about Our Noble Selves, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

Cover design by Richard Ogle/TW

Big Sky (Jackson Brodie 5)
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 18 June 2019
HB, e, audio, 368pp, 11 hours 20min

I bought my copy of this book and listened to the audio version via a subscription service.

It's all Kate's fault. Not Atkinson (though I'[ll come to her in a moment), no I mean Kate of For Winter Nights. I had this on my pile to read over Christmas, but then Kate's review came along and I couldn't leave it till then, but I had blogtour commitments and stuff, so I Audioed it while driving between home and station.

The upshot of which is that I now have NO Atkinson to read over Christmas AND I have to catch up on Jackson Brodie... which actually means I have four Atkinsons to read over Christmas, I think? So perhaps I should be thanking the Kates, actually.

Anyway. Let's frame things right. This is not a crime novel. It doesn't have a detective who, in the teeth of the police, gets to the bottom of things. it doesn't feature a DI who has gone maverick, a cynical pathologist, or a picturesque country setting.

Well, it kind of does. Jackson Brodie is a detective, but he doesn't defy the police and find the truth. He kind of stumbles along, musing on life, and plays his part. There is a DI but she is peripheral, a pair of detective constables are more central but, again, they don't really solve anything. And there is a pathologist but she's a character in a long running TV drama, Collier, and played by Brodie's ex, Julia (whose comments on various things intercut this book). Collier is filmed on the East Coast of Yorkshire so, really, there is a picturesque setting.

But I hold to my view that this isn't crime. While crimes occur in the book - oh so many crimes - and there is even a body found in a garden, the book is not about the process of solving the crimes so much as about people - about women - getting out from under their shadow. No, this is a book about the evil that men do, and I have to say, it didn't make me feel great about being a man.

The background to the story is that a child trafficking and exploitation ring, wound up several years before, is being reinvestigated (by the two DCs, Reggie and Ronnie (I know)). This has caused various guilty parties some concern and arms are being twisted to command silence. At the same time, a human trafficking operation run by three unlovely men is raking in money hand over fist. The book is about those caught up in the two schemes, the women who were scarred by the earlier one, and the women deceived and abused in the second. It makes for very raw, very distressing reading (if you let yourself think about it, that is, which of course you should) and, as I have said, for me, quite shaming reading because really the men in here do not acquire themselves well (mostly - there are exceptions, Jackson himself, of course, a young man named Harry and drag queen Bunny).

I've seen criticism of this book that it ends too soon, that it's not, well, crime-y enough but I think that misses the point. This book is about lives. It's about consequences. About fear and complicity. All of that needs space to develop and - while obviously it can be done - that doesn't require a Mystery, Clues and a Solution. (I'm really not trying to diss crime fiction here, I love it, especially a decent series and this is a series so we have that, I'm just saying, come to this book with the right expectations).

So I loved that, even after the crime-y bit was resolved, the story would down gently, sorting out other threads concerning Jackson, Harry, his stepmum and others, bringing bits of redemption, showing some of the guilty being punished - and others escaping. It's a tense story focussed on unbelievable levels of suffering and betrayal and it felt right to come back up gradually. At least it did to me.

I also don't want to give the impression this book is dark or depressing. Well yes it is dark, in places, the overall impression I took away was its spot-on portrayal of a while gallery of contrasting, alive, real people. The different voices come through so strongly - Julia in the little asides that come in to Jackson's mind all the time (both their appositeness and the fact that he keeps recalling them), the repeated motif of 'Tina [or Christina, or Christina and Fi] running away', Jackson recalling the label of 'Luddite' flung at him by his daughter, Harry's mild teenage angst and his incomprehension of Miss Dangerfield's feelings - which the reader will have spotted as well as the action she has taken, and so much more. Of course the audio version has Jason Isaacs' (who played Brodie in a TV adaptation of Case Histories) who injects life and action into all the voices - coping superbly with the interjections, and range of accents.

As I have said, all this now gives me the wonderful dilemma of when and how I can go back through the previous Jackson Brodies...

Review - Transcription by Kate Atkinson

Design by Richard Ogle

Transcription
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 6 September 2018
HB, 337pp

I bought my copy of this book.

I should have read Transcription when it came out in September but with a lot of distractions, it slipped and I picked it up to read over Christmas. Once I did, I couldn't put it down.

Atkinson's latest is, simply, masterly. It's an immersive, compelling account of one woman's war (a phrase borrowed from the title of one of her source books, sorry) and of the price she pays for it later.

Following the death of her seamstress mother, Juliet Armstrong - a bright, scholarship girl with Oxbridge ambitions - attends secretarial college instead, then joins MI5 as a typist at the beginning of the Second World War. She assigned to monitor Nazi sympathisers in 'Operation Godfrey'. This basically means transcribing covertly recorded conversations between an MI5 agent, Godfrey Toby, and the sympathisers ('the neighbours'). They think he's a German agent, allowing him to prevent them passing on useful information to anyone who might make use of it.

The story moves backwards and forwards between 1940 - those fatal weeks around the fall of France - and 1950, by which time Juliet is ensconced at the BBC as a producer of schools programmes. Atkinson plays a long game here, gradually introducing elements looking back and hinting at how the events of 1940 played out, and how they may still haunt Juliet. More is implied than said, but it soon becomes clear that she wasn't just transcribing but at one stage actively infiltrating the 'Right Club'. (This contains just the kind of ghastly people you'd expect - traitors and cryptofascists happy to  collaborate with tyranny just to protect their privileged position in the world. Mostly, rather stupid people, of a type that, unfortunately, doesn't die out). That leads her into danger, at first of a rather 'Girls' own' type but soon becoming more serious - Atkinson drops more hints, about deaths, even as Juliet's role in 1950 becomes more complex too.

At the heart of the book are two mysteries. What really is going on at the BBC? With old MI5 contacts apparently popping up and threatening messages being sent, the past seems to be reaching out for Juliet, the corridors of Broadcasting House no longer safe, a series of mistakes threatening her position at the BBC. And what really was going on in Dolphin Square in 1940? Who, exactly, was on what side? Might a network of collaborators have been a useful asset for an MI5 agent wanting to hedge their bets?

As the story becomes more complicated, truth being reflected around that labyrinth of mirrors to which spy fiction is prone, Atkinson keeps the reader focussed less on the 'what' than on the 'why' and on the consequences. There are consequences; one character spells this out explicitly towards the end, but really, we've been aware of that all along. Just look at Juliet. She is a composed, resourceful and self-aware young woman - whether in 1940 or 1950 - yet continually speculates on the future, the past, her place in MI5 or the BBC, on the effect of what she did on others (especially this). Juliet is, really, our window into some very strange worlds at a time when so much hung in the balance. The story has often been told about how in May 1940, the UK wavered on the brink of capitulation, with an influential factor in favour of peace. This is not that story - the story of Cabinet debates and Parliamentary oratory - but it also is that story - the story of what ordinary (and extraordinary) people were doing and saying that lets us imagine how they might have responded had things been different.

Readers of Atkinson's last two books, Life After Life and A God in Ruins will be familiar with some of these themes (responsibility; consequences; the price that might be paid) which she also examined there, through the lens of a kind of of multiple worlds universe and she - teasingly - alludes to this I think. In the opening scenes, set in 1981, a Royal Wedding is coming, reminding me of the framing of A God in Ruins, and there's a certain amount of overlap too in the 1940s setting and in what we might imagine Juliet's later life to have been like. But this isn't a book in that world. The alternate paths taken here are choices made and fixed and then reflected on, not points that might yet go a different way in another life. That makes the stakes, I suppose, higher, and the things Juliet has done graver.

The book is tremendous fun, shrewdly observed (a great deal of this revolving around the internal politics of a bureaucracy such as the BBC or MI5 - Juliet wonders if these two are not really fundamentally the same organisation - but also taking in things such as class and the state of British food in the 1950s) and very human in the way it deals not only the murky shenanigans of espionage but with the frail people caught up in it. Monstrous as they are, there is still some sympathy for Mrs Scaife and her entourage of would-be collaborators and Quislings. While some readers may think they never really got what was coming too them, I'm not sure; they see their hopes and plans dashed and many suffer personal loss - and as we seen, the forces of the State pretty much play fast and loose with law and decency to achieve their ends.

Best of all though, this is a thunderingly good story, the kind of thing you won't want to be parted from till it's finished.

Those are the very best books, and this is among the best of them.