Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum

'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' is Kate Atkinson's debut novel, first published in 1995 and narrated by Ruby Lennox, born in 1952 to a middle-class family who lives above a pet shop in York. The plot alternates between chapters recounting significant events in Ruby's childhood during the 1950s and 1960s and extended "footnotes" about her family's earlier generations told in non-chronological order.

Most importantly, what happened to Ruby's great-grandmother Alice has ramifications for the entire family for many years to come. 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum,' like Atkinson's most recent novels Life After Life and A God in Ruins, is a multi-generational family saga with a twisting structure that, thankfully, doesn't distract too much from her brilliant character observation. With four sprawling generations to contend with, the Lennox family tree is more complex than that of the Todd family in Atkinson's later novels, but the connections between the characters and the numerous revelations that eventually follow are handled deftly.

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Based on the careful plotting in 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum,' it is not surprising that Atkinson later moved into the crime fiction genre in her series of novels featuring private investigator Jackson Brodie. Ruby's childhood includes a family gathering for the Queen's coronation, vacations in Whitby and Scotland, a wedding, and a number of deaths. While some significant events, such as the death of Ruby's older sister Gillian, are revealed to the reader long before they occur, the fates of certain other family members are far more ambiguous.

It is later revealed that this is for good reason, as while including a family tree diagram would help readers get to know the large cast of characters, it would also reveal too much too soon. Much of the domestic drama takes place while Ruby is still too young to fully comprehend the implications of what is going on around her, but Atkinson reveals clues to the reader through her character's youthful naivety. This helps inject some humour into some not-so-humorous situations in a novel dominated by family tragedy and the trauma of two World Wars.

'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' is an impressive debut novel and a deserving winner of the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Award. Seeking out more of Atkinson's excellent writing was definitely worthwhile, and while I won't be setting myself a specific goal, I will be making a greater effort this year to explore the back catalogues of authors I have discovered through their recent work.










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