Transcription by Kate Atkinson is both chilling and hilarious

London, 1940. Juliet Armstrong has a boring clerical job in "the Registry" at Wormwood Scrubs, hq of a burgeoning MI5. One day she's approached by Perry Gibbons, who introduces himself, saying "I need a girl, I'm afraid."

"Well...I am a girl, I suppose." This response reflects the author's trademark sheen of humour; Juliet's  thoughts sharpen the comic tone. Impressed by his "firm voice, a nice low register that spoke of both kindness and unassailable authority in a man," she agrees to work for him. Not that she has much choice -- as her friend Clarissa puts it, after a desultory interview, "I think you've been plucked." And so Juliet becomes joins a special operation and becomes a kind of clerical spy, transcribing the words of a group of fifth columnists who meet in the next door apartment to the operation's "office" in Dolphin Square.

Kate Atkinson conveys both characters and setting with devastating wit and power. Readers acquire insight into Juliet from her idle thoughts about word meanings and rhymes, and laugh when she learns that someone's husband is an actuary and wonders what that is, then decides it sounds "as if it belonged in a zoo, along with a cassowary and a dromedary." Learning that "Juliet and Hartley had long since abandoned manners with each other," and find it "refreshing to behave without respect towards someone," the reader absorbs a wealth of information about the social rules of the time. Then there is Juliet's touching but innocent hope that her boss might kiss her -- before she eventually clues in to the fact that he is gay.

Sometimes the comedy takes on a darker hue, as with the sketch of the pilot Juliet had "briefly dated" during the war. When he lost a leg in a crash landing returning from a raid, "He made light of it, joked about it endlessly from his hospital bed (Not a leg to stand on, Pull the other one, and so on)." In the same sentence, we learn that "it ruined him and he gassed himself in his mother's kitchen after he was released from hospital," making Juliet "furious." Convinced that she would have stood by the one-legged pilot, she thinks of her other past lovers as "mistakes."

Long after the war Juliet is working for the BBC when she receives a threatening note saying she will pay for what she did. "Must I?" she wonders, sensing the "clumsily stitched wound" of her war service opening up again, and thinking the war "had thrown up plenty of unpaid debts -- why should she be the one being presented with the bill?" She also wonders who "is going to be next to pop out of the box" that is supposed to keep her past contained.

Astutely, she senses "some kind of osmotic membrane between the Corporation and the Service, employees moving from one world to the other without hindrance...Sometimes you had to wonder if MI5 was using the BBC for its own purposes. Or indeed, if it was the other way round." She also feels there is a "quasi-religious tone to the Corporation. Broadcasting House itself was dedicated to 'Almighty God,' as if [he] was looking down benevolently on the transmitters from the clouds," and wonders if that too is a front.

The reader gets a clear sense of Juliet's character through her conversations with other as well as herself. When she and a doleful Prendergast discuss "isms," Juliet considers these: fascism, communism, and capitalism, and comments "We lose sight of the ideal that propelled them and yet millions die in defence of -- or attack on -- those beliefs." As well as being a clear thinker, Juliet has a high level of self-awareness, as when she observes herself feeling "slighted yet relieved," and thinks it "curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord."

The plot of the story hinges on this: who is using whom for what? Who is one of them and who one of us? In a moment that combines horror and hilarity, Juliet finds herself in the Brompton Oratory with the dog of an absent spy, trying to keep out of sight of someone she thinks is "one of us." Yet he has just mysteriously handed something over to "the man in the astrakhan-collared coat," whom she has seen on a few occasions, and suspects may be "one of them." Obliged to hold the dog firmly and duck down twice to avoid being seen, she begins to feel "almost religious."

It's all very complicated. As Juliet concludes, people disappear from history, not by being erased, but by being "explained away."

Geraldton War Memorial in Western Australia

This war memorial comemmorates the 745 sailors lost when the HMAS Sydney was sunk off Shark Bay during WWII.

The dome is comprised of gulls, and rests on seven pillars that represent the seven states of Australia. In the memorial garden, a bronze statue of a woman keeps watch over the pool below, symbolizing the women who watch and wait in wartime. Here visitors can visit and contemplate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Remembering our shared past: a ride through the jungle on an Army Duck

The amphibious Army Duck gave a group of tourists a ride through the jungle at Kuranda in Australia's tropical Northern Territory. We bumped along a rutted track, looking at basket ferns, blueberry ginger, and some of the many poisonous plants that grow in the world's oldest rainforest. The vehicle became a boat and we travelled through muddy brown waters before emerging onto a rough track.

Like many other human inventions that we use daily and with less awareness of their history, this vehicle was devised for use in war.

Remembering our past: Trinity Beach, Australia in WWII

To visit this out-of-the-way beach, we got a car from Cairns. The brisk wind was blowing roiled the sand, making the blue water look brown. After a pleasant interval lying on the soft sand sunning ourselves, we shared a meal in a nearly deserted beachside restaurant. Strolling on the beach afterwards, we read signs detailing the history of this place in WWII. With the Japanese in control of nearby Papua New Guinea, this became a site where Allied men practiced the skills of amphibious warfare. The current threats are stingrays and crocodiles.

Remembering our past: Potshot Memorial, Western Australia

Standing opposite the RAAF's Learmonth airport, this memorial seems to be in the middle of nowhere. But during WWII, this place was a submarine base and a refueling facility. The Australian armed forces ran anti-aircraft guns, radio and radar stations, and provided fighter cover for submarines. The Allies devised Operation Jaywick in 1942. Disguised as a fishing boat, a ship left Exmouth Gulf for Japanese-controlled Singapore. The crew attached limpet mines to Japanese ships, blowing up seven of them.

The raiders returned safely to Potshot without being found out, and the disguised boat was used for a second operation. In 1943, Japan bombed the Potshot base. In 1945 a cyclone damaged the facilities and they were subsequently closed.

Brother Kemal by Jakob Arjuni

When a wealthy woman hires Kemal Kayankaya to find her missing daughter, the private detective quickly gets the girl away from the clutches of a notorious pimp. However, to get her home safely means walking away from a bit of a mess. Meanwhile, he accepts a job as a bodyguard for a Tunisian author during the Frankfurt Book Fair. Aware that "the risk of dying in an attack involving explosives is a hundred times less than the risk of choking on a mini-mozzarella," Kemal doesn't take the publisher's talk of threats too seriously. He assumes the bodyguard is being provided "for promotional purposes."

Raised in Gemany, the orphaned Kemal has learned no Turkish. Yet in multicultural Frankfurt, even dealing with his French client and her Dutch husband, he can't escape being stereotyped.

This is a book where people wear masks and nothing is what it seems. Watching the transparently phony act of his client Valerie, Kemal concludes that she herself "no longer knew what she did unintentionally and what was a calculation or a trick."

All around him, values are upended. When Octavian, his policeman friend, confides that he knows "a great many people who prefer to save their own skin over the punishment of a criminal," Kemal tells him he's '"been in the Vice Squad too long," adding, "It's bad for your morals."' In fact, the cop is aware of an informer in his own ranks passing information to a known criminal, but puts off disturbing "the pyramid of police power" as his "promotion is due in a few weeks."

Nothing is as it seems. Kemal suspects a devout sheikh of resorting to kidnapping and threats to protect his nephew, a pimp who sells heroin. Receiving a strange phone call from this man, the "Turk" does not respond as expected to the sheik's "heavy hints and impenetrable remarks," but tells him to quit beating about the bush and get to the point. Convinced that Kemal Kayankaya is a Muslim name, the sheik later gives him a Koran.

Only with Kemal's wife Deborah can the reader relax into knowing that what we see is what we get. Her character is the classic uncomplicated ex-tart with a heart of gold.

In contrast to its red cover, the genre of the novel tends toward the noir, leavened by touches of sharp humour. This topsy turvy detective story by the talented Jakob Arjouni is a wild ride, full of ironic twists expressed in deliciously skillful language. This talented writer hit the ground running, winning a prize for his first novel, published at age 18. He died aged 49 in 2013, the year this final Kayankaya novel was published.

Water: Barlow's work for water inspires communities to go blue, one at a time

At the Whistler Writers conference last week, Maude Barlow spoke with host Bill Richardson and novelist Omar el Akkad about the world's water. Barlow is one of those leading the charge against the increasingly corporate control of water. Her leadership and work were instrumental in persuading the UN to declare it a basic human right in 2010.

Nestle's 2017 annual bottled sales were $8 billion. It operates in 34 countries and owns 49 brands of bottled water, including Perrier. Vittel provides one example of the results. While Nestle pumps out a million litres a day, the local water table continues to drop. Similar water grabs are taking place in Ethiopia, Pakistan, Tasmania, Calfornia. The list goes on. While "Fiji water" is bottled in imported plastic bottles from China, Fijians lack safe water to drink.

"If placed end to end, the number of single-use plastic bottles now sold each year would extend more than halfway to the sun," Barlow tells us. 91% of these DO NOT get recycled. Nestle now owns the water park in the Brazilian spa town Sao Lourenco. In 2018, due to over-extraction and the resulting bacterial contamination, the nation's health authority banned the sale of water from that plant. In the face of protests by local women whose water supply is being drained away, Nestle still uses its "rights," permitting another company to extract water from the same well.

In another South American country, a private company claimed ownership of falling rain, and tried to forbid people to capture it. Writing at UVIC in 2014, Katie Duke pointed out in a research article that in BC, "the legality of collecting rainwater is uncertain." As US droughts increase, the issue of who "owns" the rain has come under discussion there as well.

Revealing the power of economics on government, Barlow shares the related shocking fact that "a 2016 study of the 100 top economies in the world, 69 were corporations, up from 63 the previous year." According to Global Justice Now, "the ten biggest corporations, including Walmart, Apple and Shell, make more money than most of the countries of the world combined," and "Walmart is bigger than Spain, Australia and the Netherlands."

Yet there is hope. While senior governments fail to act, continuing to support free trade agreements that define water as a saleable commodity, Blue Communities are stepping up. This movement began in 2009 in response to policies of the Harper Conservative government then in power. From Canada, where 27 municipalities joined the movement, the concept spread to cities in Europe and South America, then to institutions including universities, unions and faith-based organizations. Since the 2019 publication of Barlow's book, Victoria, Montreal and Los Angeles are among the cities that have declared themselves Blue.

In line with the 2010 UN resolution that declares water and sanitation fundamental human rights, each "Blue Community promises to protect water as a public trust," and to ensure that decisions about access to water and sanitation are made by "people and their elected officials, not by a for-profit investor." Where clean sources of water are available, Blue Communities also promises to phase out bottled water and to promote municipal tap water as safe and reliable sources.

Working toward universal access to clean water involves many other changes. By taking back control of water from corporations, individuals and communities cannot help but lighten the human footprint on our earthly home. Water is life. Rather than following the current flood of vicious propaganda that encourages shaming, blaming and tribal bunkerism, we need to come together over basic human issues that concern us all. The lesson for the 21st century is simple. As a human race, we are one. It's time to start acting that way. Promoting Blue Communities is one manageable way to begin.