A Curated Life: Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum
All authors have distinct voices. Some are faint, only curling around the words. Others are immediately recognisable, clutching at the reader’s mind and twisting it just so. Kate Atkinson’s voice is a church bell tolling across the English countryside. But when it reaches you it doesn’t shock, but pulls you closer. Some of Atkinson’s characters you will like, others you will quickly despise, but you will find yourself relating to all of them. Atkinson’s voice is immensely personal, familial in a way that is difficult to articulate. Her broad casts of characters are undeniably human but it is in their relationships to each other that they become so familiar, so real.
Atkinson writes of lives that arc through decades filled with education, arguments, boredom, and death; seldom interrupted with remarkable events. Mundane yes, but in Atkinson’s hands, never dull. So artfully does Atkinson bring the reader into the lives and relationships of her characters that the mundane events that cross the pages are soon revealed to be only the tip of a vast iceberg. Atkinson’s writing is proof that you do not need remarkable events to live a remarkable life.
The life at the centre of Behind the Scenes at the Museum is that of Ruby Lennox, born in York after the Second World War to a mother who already feels overwhelmed by her children. Ruby’s life, traced through the middle of the twentieth century, is interlaced with those of her relatives, near and distant. These threads, and their links to Ruby’s life, are told through a series of long footnotes, really chapters in themselves, that pull the reader from Ruby’s life and casts them to another time and place. Though they are part of the charm, part of the familial sense the book gives, at points the multiple characters and timelines can be confusing. Towards the end of Behind the Scenes at the Museum I found myself confused at how one character or another linked back to Ruby through her ever growing family tree.
Ruby is the narrator of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but the book isn’t just about her. Indeed it is difficult to say quite what Behind the Scenes at the Museum is about. Is it about the lives of Ruby’s family? About the secret lurking just out of Ruby’s earshot? Or something more? Atkinson freely admits, and seems to relish, the indefinite focus of the book. Perhaps she is right to; it is a cruel prison to constrain a book to be about any single thing. In her postscript, Atkinson asserts that the real central character, the only one present in all chapters and in all threads, is the city of York itself.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a curious title for a book that has very little to do with museums. It is of course a metaphor of sorts for the story told, but in the book’s postscript Atkinson confesses that she awoke one day firm in the knowledge that Behind the Scenes at the Museum was the title of a rather strange dream she had just had, and that it also happened to fit the book she was in the process of pinning on paper.
Atkinson seems to have only realised it after the fact, but there is a museum within the covers of this book, a museum of Atkinson’s own childhood, and her relationship with York, the city where she, like Ruby, was born. Atkinson has poured much of herself into Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her own life, experiences and stories so filled the pages that she was compelled to declare that ‘I am not Ruby Lennox, but she is me’. This perhaps is the simple secret to Atkinson’s writing, her books feel personal, because they are.
In her review, in the London Review of Books, the wonderful Hilary Mantel declared Behind the Scenes at the Museum ‘outrageously funny on almost every page’. It speaks to the strength of Atkinson’s writing that I feel that I have read a different book. For me, Behind the Scenes at the Museum was an emotional journey, and I felt drained at the end. Drained yet content. Within the pages of Atkinson’s museum a reader will find a journey. Perhaps it will be a turbulent one. Perhaps it will be entertaining. Perhaps it will be something else entirely. It is a journey I recommend you take.
-H
