The abridgement did not mean that I did not enjoy this novel, simply that I may have missed some important elements and my comments may suffer consequently. It also means that I will keep this brief.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Kate Atkinson's first full-length novel. I bought it, (i) following the advice of my literary guru-of-the-moment that "anything by Kate Atkinson" would do the business, (ii) because they actually had it in the rapidly vanishing "spoken word" section of Nottingham Waterstones and (iii) because I had, albeit rather vaguely, heard of it.
This is such an English book. It is English in its understatement, English in its evocation of rainy holidays-from-hell in unexotic locations, English in its wryly humorous response to disaster, English in its 1950s and 1960s provincial smallness and greyness, English in its attitudes and accents, English in its oblique allusiveness, where talk constantly skirts around the important things. It is also a supremely accomplished book, one which takes us with a counterintuitively light and jokey touch through a family saga of repeated, almost inevitable-seeming death and disaster, both historical and contemporary, as well as small-town infidelities and dysfunctional family dynamics, all the while sucking us down, on a trajectory rich with hints and half-hidden clues, in an accelerating spiral like water emptying out of some great pit, towards the central, hidden truth with reveals so much about why the characters we have come to know are as they are. This big reveal, the nature, though not the details, of which we have gradually discerned, is anything but funny, and breaks dramatically with the so-English well-never-mind tone that gives the novel so much of its humour and character.
You could call this a coming-of-age story. The narrator, Ruby Lennox, who quirkily and knowingly begins to tell us her tale at the very moment of conception - "I exist!" - comes to terms over the novel's length, besides with the life-defining but suppressed event which the book leads up to, with a pre-emptively disenchanted mother, whose main emotion seems to be irritation and who harbours remarkably few maternal impulses, and a father whose breadwinning and protective instincts take second place behind other instincts leading in the direction of well-endowed barmaids and assorted floozies. For example, as Ruby reports, at the moment of her birth, where was he? - “with a pint of bitter in front of him and [...] just telling a woman in an emerald dress and a ‘D’ cup that he is not married.” Besides these parents, there are siblings, innumerable aunts, rather fewer uncles, plenty of cousins and the ancestors whose late nineteenth and early twentieth century vicissitudes are related in the early part of the book as "footnotes" (though this was not apparent in audiobook form). There is school, there is a lecherous butcher, there is a nastily hostile stepparent, there are most unfortunate neighbours... Atkinson does a superb job of building a world for Ruby to inhabit and grow up in, a world delineated by a clear sense of place, York, and a flat above a pet shop (at least until the purifying fire which destroys it), a world placed in a wonderfully evoked society - two set pieces, a gathering to watch the 1953 Coronation and a wedding reception clashing with the 1966 World Cup final are sheer brilliance in this respect - and a world with roots, roots in the experiences of previous generations, wars, bereavements, and making do.
This is such an English book. It is English in its understatement, English in its evocation of rainy holidays-from-hell in unexotic locations, English in its wryly humorous response to disaster, English in its 1950s and 1960s provincial smallness and greyness, English in its attitudes and accents, English in its oblique allusiveness, where talk constantly skirts around the important things. It is also a supremely accomplished book, one which takes us with a counterintuitively light and jokey touch through a family saga of repeated, almost inevitable-seeming death and disaster, both historical and contemporary, as well as small-town infidelities and dysfunctional family dynamics, all the while sucking us down, on a trajectory rich with hints and half-hidden clues, in an accelerating spiral like water emptying out of some great pit, towards the central, hidden truth with reveals so much about why the characters we have come to know are as they are. This big reveal, the nature, though not the details, of which we have gradually discerned, is anything but funny, and breaks dramatically with the so-English well-never-mind tone that gives the novel so much of its humour and character.
You could call this a coming-of-age story. The narrator, Ruby Lennox, who quirkily and knowingly begins to tell us her tale at the very moment of conception - "I exist!" - comes to terms over the novel's length, besides with the life-defining but suppressed event which the book leads up to, with a pre-emptively disenchanted mother, whose main emotion seems to be irritation and who harbours remarkably few maternal impulses, and a father whose breadwinning and protective instincts take second place behind other instincts leading in the direction of well-endowed barmaids and assorted floozies. For example, as Ruby reports, at the moment of her birth, where was he? - “with a pint of bitter in front of him and [...] just telling a woman in an emerald dress and a ‘D’ cup that he is not married.” Besides these parents, there are siblings, innumerable aunts, rather fewer uncles, plenty of cousins and the ancestors whose late nineteenth and early twentieth century vicissitudes are related in the early part of the book as "footnotes" (though this was not apparent in audiobook form). There is school, there is a lecherous butcher, there is a nastily hostile stepparent, there are most unfortunate neighbours... Atkinson does a superb job of building a world for Ruby to inhabit and grow up in, a world delineated by a clear sense of place, York, and a flat above a pet shop (at least until the purifying fire which destroys it), a world placed in a wonderfully evoked society - two set pieces, a gathering to watch the 1953 Coronation and a wedding reception clashing with the 1966 World Cup final are sheer brilliance in this respect - and a world with roots, roots in the experiences of previous generations, wars, bereavements, and making do.
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| Kate Atkinson |
But to call this just a coming-of-age novel would be insufficient. It also has a lot to say about the world it depicts, its stoic and humour-redeemed virtues, it neuroses and weaknesses. And perhaps, above all, it says a lot about families, which however dysfunctional, disappearing and actively damaging, cannot be escaped. In this book, the inescapable family not only does the damage but also ultimately offers some sort of redemption, even paradoxically some kind of escape, also, as it happens, a form of escape in its mechanics quite characteristic of 1960s and 1970s England. I say no more for fear of spoiling.
Finally, humour. I mentioned it, but maybe I didn't make the comedy of this novel clear enough. There were out-loud laughs in the car as we motored northwards. It is characteristic that a death, that of Ruby's father George, provides one of the funniest moments. You'll see.
At least I hope you will, as this is a very good book, one I warmly recommend, certainly even better in unabridged form.
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