![]() ![]() Toby (who is based on a historical character) is a shadowy, Prospero-like figure, often to be found emerging from the mist, whose fate becomes entangled with Juliet’s through unexpected tragedy. In 1940, Juliet is employed by MI5 to transcribe recordings of meetings in a bugged flat between a group of fascist sympathisers and a man named Godfrey Toby, whom the fifth columnists believe is a Gestapo agent but is actually a British spy monitoring his informers. ![]() ![]() She remembered seeing Gaslight during the war.” In the aftermath of war, trying to locate the source of an anonymous threat, Juliet finds the multiple deceptions she has practised, and had practised upon her, accumulate to create a creeping paranoia in which “things are seldom what they seem”, as one man remarks, quoting Gilbert and Sullivan. ![]() Juliet is less obviously at the mercy of authorial tricks than Ursula Todd or her brother Teddy, respectively the protagonists of the previous two books, but the inventions she inhabits are created for her by others, mostly her male handlers at MI5, all of whom appear to be living fiendishly complex double or triple lives themselves. Atkinson’s great gift is for presenting the mundanity of ordinary life with wry detachment ![]()
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