Behind the Scenes at the Museum – Kate Atkinson (Doubleday 1995)

I am about to retrace my journey.... I have a life to go back to. I have been away long enough.

---

This is the first Atkinson novel I’ve read and, although I knew it was very well received on publication and is now studied as an A-level text, it lived up to the hype. In style and content, it is a mix of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But there’s a lot more than one death – when it came to the body count, I ran out of fingers. Then again, it’s a generational saga and Ruby Lennox’s family is a rambling and very unlucky one.

Ruby’s narrative position and style are interesting. Although she’s a first-person narrator, she’s also omniscient. In documenting her family history, she fills in the information gaps between major events in the story with sections of footnotes which contextualise the these. This retrospective explanation allows her to surprise the readers more with the big moments without compromising our understanding or sacrificing her attention to detail. And, as the novel progresses, the footnotes themselves become part of the story, often linked to it through apparently insignificant personal items (a button or an earring), so that readers come to expect these things to carry stories of their own. Ruby’s all-seeing narrative eye, with its ability to focus on and reveal the importance of anything in a scene, allows for another type of surprise: when a detail that feels significant (Uncle Ted’s predilection, for example) is not picked up later in the story.

Despite the prevalence of death – often through terrible misfortune – Ruby maintains a carefreeness of tone and rapidity of pace that make most matters tragicomic. In regular asides, she comments on a character’s forthcoming demise with wry resignation and amused pity: “She does not yet know that the price exacted for this…is, generally speaking, and untimely death. Poor X!” Or, when one character tries to imagine a drowned relative’s death-agony: “What did you think of when you were drowning? (Nothing in Y’s case because he was hit on the head by a crate of Spam as he fell into the water.)” It is as if these disasters, when considered through the long lens of history, are being reinterpreted as repeated confirmations of human misguidedness. All except one death, that is. Just when I was wondering if Ruby’s record of all her family drama felt too insouciant, Atkinson had her describe an event that revealed the novel’s emotional depth, not to mention that of the narrator-protagonist.

So, the storytelling is entertaining and profound. And, inevitably, it is partly an exploration of storytelling. Ruby questions (to herself and us) her fellow characters’ thoughts and motives, she provides us with answers to the questions they ask, and she questions her own narrative decisions before explaining them: “I don’t think this is Kansas, teddy. But where on earth is it?” Raking her memory, she also exposes its fallibility of her memories: “Who knows? Not me. And why am I here? Is this a holiday? It doesn’t feel like a holiday.” It’s a wonderful book. Read it.