Point of View

Transcription is narrated from the third person limited point-of-view in the past tense. This means that there is a narrator describing the action from a remove, only providing the thoughts, actions, and feelings of the main character, Juliet Armstrong, and not any of the secondary characters. There is very little difference in this case between first and third narration, with the exception of the pronouns used. The narrator provides a window into Juliet's mind and heart, allowing the reader to understand her motivations (most of the time) and the anxiety and excitement she feels as the MI5 operations she is involved in begin to escalate.

In the early pages of the novel, the narrator describes Juliet's backstory in a way that captures her pain and desperation shortly before she was recruited by MI5. Her reaction to her mother's death is depicted poignantly: “She was seventeen...