Behind The Scenes At The Museum by Kate Atkinson

Dry Drayton Book Group choice January 2023

This is Kate Atkinson’s debut novel which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year.  Based in York, and starting with her conception in 1951 the novel tells the story of Ruby Lennox throughout her childhood and into adulthood.   The structure of the novel is unusual in that, the main narrative chapters are interspersed with ‘Footnotes’ which are chapter length descriptions of key events in the lives of the family’s ancestors; in particular depicting wartime experiences of the male relatives.  

Kate Atkinson slowly reveals key tragic elements that Ruby experienced through her childhood, particularly the death of two of her siblings which are only explained at points which tend to be out of context and certainly out of chronology.  This is a clever device in that it sets clues for the reader which take a while to be resolved.  However, these clues, together with the juxtaposition of the footnotes and narrative chapters made it an irritating read for many members of the group.  On the other hand, some were delighted by how the lives of previous family members were interspersed between Ruby’s story. These hidden histories, both in a historical and familial context, added depth and meaning to Ruby’s own life, and reflected the book’s theme that museum artefacts are not just solitary items, but that they contain rich and interlocking stories that have led to the way we are today. It is thought the “Museum” of the title is the York Castle Museum, which contains many of the shop façades and artefacts that are mentioned the book.

The group did agree that the characters were well drawn and that the story was evocative of childhood in the 1950s and 1960s with the details of daily life being extremely well described.  One member of the group who had read the novel some years ago and re-read it for the meeting found that the second reading gave a better understanding of the main characters, in particular of Ruby’s mother.  There is also quite a lot of humour in the narrative drawn from the scrapes that some of the characters manage to get themselves into.  Those members who had read her later book ‘Life after Life’ enjoyed that more than they did this debut novel finding the large number of peripheral characters distracting from the main thread of the story.