Behind The Scenes At The Museum (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
The year is 1951 and Atkinson gives us Ruby, our unconventional, imaginative narrator who greets us with the exuberant opening revelation: “I exist!” At this moment, our narrator has just been conceived, deep within her mother Bunty's womb. The environs provide sustenance but little else. Instead, Ruby treats us to a ring-side seat to the endless rounds of discontent played out between Bunty and her husband George. An unassuming observer, Ruby gives us the benefit of her droll commentary, able to relate even the unimaginative hostility of her mother's dreams. She will soon (well, in 9 months) be joining two sisters: 5 year old brooding Patricia, and nearly 3 year old Gillian, the golden girl, the up to now baby of the family and center of all attention. What a surprise Gillian is in for, Ruby muses laconically.The setting is York, England – established as a fortress by the Romans, garrisoned by the famed lost legion – the Ninth, reinventing itself under the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, and even into modern times after heavy bombardment during World War II. It's a city filled with ancient buildings and historic events. The meaning of history – not the capital H kind, but the small personal accretions over time – is the core of this novel. We follow Ruby's life through a series of comedically awful family events including the extended family gathering to watch the coronation of Elizabeth II, a poorly thought-out disaster of a vacation to Scotland (a Hibernian farmhouse in a countryside village that sounds like 'Och-na-cock-a-leekie') and the wedding of Uncle Ted on a day which happens to coincide with the World Cup final (between England and Germany, no less). In addition to their narrative function, these events introduce us to three preceding generations of the matrilineal line. First, there are Bunty's siblings, Clifford, Babs, Betty, and Ted. Their mother is Nell, the youngest of an even larger clutch of siblings: Ada (died in childhood), William (Ada's twin, died in infancy), Lawrence, Tom, Albert, and Lillian. We are introduced to their mother, Alice Barker, through a photograph taken in June of 1888. Their stories are slipped in cleverly through the device of “footnotes” – brief interludes that tell the individual stories of other marital disappointments, foolish choices, lucky happenstance, pointless stoicism, poignant disillusion, and untimely deaths. Nell was part of the “lost generation,” and Atkinson makes us feel that sense of loss through the faded, barely remembered stories of these people. Such brief and intense lives, so easily forgotten. An aged Nell tries to remember a boy from her youth – a boy she once hoped to marry: “She stood in front of the mirror to brush her hair and put a dab of powder on her nose and tried to remember the smell of Jack Keech's skin and the feel of his hair, but it was so long ago now that she couldn't even remember what he looked like. It began to rain, a light summer shower, and the smell of the rain on the new June grass made Nell feel suddenly wretched.” Ruby considers the June 1888 photograph of Alice and thinks: “Nell – who on this hot day is unborn and has all her life ahead of her – will one day be my grandmother and have all her life behind her without ever knowing how that happened (another woman lost in time).” The real sense of loss is as much the sense of forgotten memories as of death.In these vignettes, even Bunty can be looked at as a sympathetic character. One memory finds her weeping on a railway platform. She has missed the train to a Sunday school outing to Scarborough because her forgetful mother Nell could not be troubled to allow enough time for the children to get to the station. The slowest, Bunty misses the train that her siblings run to and successfully catch. The devastation of World War I is conveyed in a series of reverberating events. It claims the life of ever optimistic and cherubic Albert, and leaves even the survivors with a sense of certain impending death. The confrontation with horror leaves an unbreachable gulf between those who went to war and those who didn't. Horrible things happen to individual characters but perhaps the most telling is that the men on leave never mention anything about the war to their families. Atkinson holds the reader's attention by planting several mysteries. In the opening chapters she alludes to Gillian's untimely end, piquing our curiosity. We wonder how Ruby will fare in the midst of her dysfunctional family. In addition there's a strange lacuna in her childhood story, and 4-year old Ruby relates living for a time with Aunt Babs, haunted by unnamed fears and nights of sleepwalking. Throughout the story, some of the characters turn their backs on the options at hand and we wonder about their fates. Finally, Atkinson comes to disclose certain secrets about the life of Alice Barker which were omitted from the unreliable narratives of her children. Atkinson also preserves a sense of continuity. Nell's stepmother, Rachel, keeps a rabbit's foot – a good luck token, and, in an unwonted impulse of generosity, gives it to one of Albert's friends when they depart for the War. The rabbit's foot ends up among Bunty's belongings. Alice's silver locket, given to her by her grandfather, is tucked under Lillian's pillow, and she later gives it to Nell who was too young to ever know their mother. There are other objects that turn up through the generations, and references to a gradually diminishing set of chinaware decorated with forget-me-nots. An old clock that once belonged to Alice's mother Sophie is another object that passes from generation to generation. Finally, there are out of body experiences, perhaps a genetic predisposition encouraged by the ancient history of York itself, or perhaps a gift to those in the family with a particular sensibility. Those experiences provide a satisfying contemplation of the connection between life and death.
Kate Atkinson’s first novel won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995, beating such heavyweights as Salman Rushdie and his The Moor's Last Sigh. Behind the Scenes at the Museum us ab ambitious book: a sprawling saga which spans decades of events and covers several generations of characters.Behind the Scenes at the Museum opens with the birth of its all-seeing narrator, Ruby Lennox, who begins her narration literally from conception (the first chapter begins with Ruby proclaiming "I exist! at the exact moment). The novel consists of 13 chapters, in each of which Ruby describes life of the Lennoxes, a middle-class English family from York, and their life in post-war Britain from 1951 to 1992. Each chapter is followed by a footnote, which consists of events being narrated from another perspective - Ruby's mother, Bunty, Nell, her grandmother, and the great grandmother, Alice. These footnotes - although non-chronological - provide additional information for certain characters' decisions, and explain some of the mysteries concerning missing relatives or family treasures.With its large cast of characters and extensive timeline, Behind the Scenes at the Museum is also a social history of England in miniature, with the various Lennoxes and their acquaintances standing in for the ordinary people of Britain before, during, and after the War. Although Ruby is a charming and funny narrator, the story she tells is anything but - people make poor choices and suffer the consequences, dreaming of what might have been (such as Ruby's mother, Bunty, who is unhappy in her marriage to George, her father). Personal relationships are bleak and unfulfilling in this novel, and there are many deaths - both of people and animals. It's full of humor, but not in a funny ha-ha sort of way, but funny sad.Still, it's a first novel and it shows. The amount of characters to keep track of is huge - we've got mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, nieces...as the book progresses it becomes more and more difficult to keep track of them all, which is why a family tree included in each copy would be very helpful. With the introduction of each character the novel lost a bit of its initial momentum - Ruby's enthusiastic "I exist!", a proclamation of the beginning of something important and extraordinary turned into "I exist", a mundane and ordinary existence, filled with unhappiness and lost opportunities, where we're laughing only not to cry. Still, with each new character introduced and another unhappy relationship served on my plate I haven't either laughed or cried - because frankly, my dears, I ceased to give a damn.
What do You think about Behind The Scenes At The Museum (1999)?
I don't want to say here because it's a big spoiler. But it was a HUGE twist that I just didn't believe, and it made me feel lied to by the rest of the book. If you like books with those kinds of shocking twists, then you should probably read this one. I just don't happen to enjoy this plot device.
—Eilonwy
This is a first novel, and it does show in a couple of places--the early chapters struggle to maintain the plausibility of such an adult authorial voice being refracted through the experience and understanding of a child, and there's at least one plot twist towards the end of the novel which I thought it could well have done without. Despite that, I really loved this book: the humour of it is just right for me, balanced right on the edge of tragedy. The prose achieves moments of real loveliness, without ever seeming to strive for the correct turn of phrase, and her observances of her characters are both painful and real. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for her other works.
—Siria
Atkinson’s first novel is a multi-generational family tale layered on to the story from conception to adulthood of one Ruby Lennox. Atkinson has since written another four novels, the last two at least of which are mystery-thrillers, though this one is decidedly not. More a domestic melodrama with some late, though well-seeded plot twists. The crimes here are all of the hearth and heart, not of the prosecutorial sort, but considerable nonetheless. Some parts of this book are incredibly well-written and moving (early scenes of World War I combat in one of the footnoted flashbacks, for example) and others are so sharply observant that they give the feel of a great memoir. She does pull off the tricky effect of having the first chapter narrated by the babe in the womb but the next several chapters struggle with an adult voice in an infant’s body. One wishes the book were a little more concise so as not to stress some of those devices. One also wishes it wasn’t so resolutely bleak and tragic in all its relationships—those seem the only plausible alternatives, bleak or tragic. Still, you can see how such a world view would lend itself to crime thrillers and I look forward to reading Case Histories, her highly praised next to most recent novel. This book left you feeling too strongly that things should go better here and there and that children you empathize with in one section wouldn’t be such horrid adults in another.
—Rick
