Tuesday, 15 April 2025

Behind The Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

This book announced the arrival of Kate Atkinson as a new novelist, and won the Whitbread Book of The Year in 1995, beating The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie and a biography of William Ewart Gladstone by Roy Jenkins. She has now become an established and well-read writer with 13 further books, including Life after Life, and a God in Ruins both of which have been filmed.

"I exist!". It is 1951 and Ruby Lennox has come into existence as a fertilized egg after her mother Bunty has received the amorous attentions of her half-drunk husband George. Amazingly and unscientifically this egg narrates the first chapter of the novel as though from some clestial viewpoint. I found this hard to take; the reader can allow a degree of poetic licence but this was scientific licence gone mad - a fertilized egg does not have “tiny naked heels" to tap together! I nearly stopped reading, however I was enjoying the downbeat tone and sardonic humour of the writing and the clever description of  family life of the 1950s - the years of my own childhood.

Following chapter one comes footnote (i) which leaps back in time to 1888.and a significant moment in the life of Alice Barker, Ruby's’s great-grandmother. We get a brief account of her back story – her mother Sophia, marriage to a drunkard farmer, a multitude of children and pregnant again. She is unhappy and despairing of her life when one particular day ......

This pattern of chapter then reference, present then past, continues throughout the book. Ruby's life unfolds together with the stories of people on her family tree, who are often represented by things like a locket, a button, a photo or a clock. The reader is presented with artifacts from people's lives as though seeing objects in a museum and then taken behind the scenes to learn their history. It's a clever way to represent the way we are all connected to our ancestors.

After just 38 pages I realised I was losing track of who was who and who was when so searched on the Internet for a list of characters. Including dolls and dogs there are173 separate names with 60 who make it onto Ruby's family tree (see below - contains spoilers). A reviewer of  another of Kate Atkinson's novels says:

“It’s a book that teems with people and places, events and incidents, and is written with the garrulous enthusiasm for which its author has rightly become celebrated.”

The story of Ruby from her birth in York, through her childhood and teen years to her forties when she decides to live out the rest of her life on the Shetland Isles is told via a series of remembered incidents, the coronation of the Queen, a holiday, a death, a wedding and so on, which is how memory works for us all.  

This is an interesting novel but rather gloomy despite the humour. No one seemed to be living a happy and fulfilled life - people were leaving home in a huff or were pregnant again, or were looking to spice up the boreom of their lives by having an affair. Some disappeared but  turned up later in Canada and Austrailia.

Chapter 2 is called "Birth and Ruby makes her appearance in the world. The chapter ends with the words, "My name is Ruby. I am a precious jewel, I am a drop of blood, I am Ruby Lennox". As she grows and changes Ruby searches for who she is. Something is missing from her life and once found she is able to settle on who she is mesnt to be.

At its heart, the book is a meditation on how our lives are shaped by seemingly random events and the stored “exhibits” of personal and collective history. The museum in the title serves as a metaphor of all our lives, where memories, secrets, and relics of the past are preserved and re-examined.

Ruby's Family Tree (Spoiler alert!)


0 comments:

Post a Comment