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Behind the Scenes at the Museum
by Kate Atkinson
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Bantam Dell Publishing Group (1997-02)
ISBN: 0552996181
EAN: 9780552996181
Dewy Decimal #: 813
Paperback: 384 pages
SKU: 07040055
Condition: Very Good as issued
Comments: Trade Paperback. British Edition published by Black Swan Books. Very Good condition with no markings. No highlights, underlines or notes in text. Minor wear to cover and shallow reading crease in spine. Tight binding and clean yellowed text. Very Nice copy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
A family saga chronicles a century of life as four generations of Yorkshire women move through two World Wars, coronations, secrets, heartbreak, and happiness, all seen through the eyes of an inimitable narrator named Ruby Lennox. A first novel.
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Amazon.com Review
"I exist!" exclaims Ruby Lennox upon her conception in 1951, setting the tone for this humorous and poignant first novel in which Ruby at once celebrates and mercilessly skewers her middle-class English family. Peppered with tales of flawed family traits passed on from previous generations, Ruby's narrative examines the lives in her disjointed clan, which revolve around the family pet shop. But beneath the antics of her philandering father, her intensely irritable mother, her overly emotional sisters, and a gaggle of eccentric relatives are darker secrets--including an odd "feeling of something long forgotten"--that will haunt Ruby for the rest of her life. Kate Atkinson earned a Whitbread Prize in 1995 for this fine first effort.
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Customer Reviews
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New favorite novel
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-09-15
Kate Atkinson manages to find humor in many of the terrible and strange situations that a person can go through. I will admit that the characters are a bit hard to follow because of the order in which the author adds footnotes. She skips back and forth from great-granddaughter to great-grandmother, however, I enjoyed slowly finding out what happened to each individual character. I fell in love with Ruby Lennox (the main character) and the clever way the author tells her story. If you are offended by someone finding the humor in disaster, this is not the book for you. If you are like me, you find the humor in life, I think you'll enjoy this book tremendously.
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too many characters
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-08-15
You know it's bad when you go online to see what the big secret is when you're halfway through the book. But that's what I finally had to do with this book. I just got overcome by curiosity. Or possibly driven mad by all the vague hints and innuendo. (And yes, all my suspicions were correct.) If you're looking to find the answer, you'll have to look elsewhere (I suggest Wikipedia), but at least now you know you're not alone in not being able to wait for the big reveal.
Aside from all the secrets, this book is populated by a vast and confusing cast of characters. Told in alternating chapters between the life of Ruby Lennox (who narrates her own story from the moment of conception) and the stories of her maternal antecedents (told in the third person), we learn about several generations of women who make bad decisions in marriage and what happens to them as a result. Needless to say, this isn't a particularly cheerful book.
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how is this so popular?
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-06-08
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
I really enjoyed Emotionally Weird, but I can't stand Behind the Scenes at the Museum. I have about 100 pages to go and although I plan to finish the book I'm certainly not looking forward to it.
I can't figure out how this book won any awards or was considered to be good by anyone. Unlike some other reviewers, I really like the third-person stories about Ruby's ancestors; it's Ruby's own story that I find completely unbearable. First of all, it's hard to develop any investment in the characters when you are told from the outset most of the things that are going to happen to them. I guess there is something interesting about a story being told this way, though. What really made it impossible for me to like the book was the incredibly cutesy asides in Ruby's sections.
Some of the cutesy asides are supposed to be funny because they're about child-Ruby not knowing things the reader presumably knows, like when she wonders why no one will tell her what Durex is. It is really hard to find these funny because after a while reading a book about someone who doesn't know anything just gets annoying. You can't even use the excuse that Ruby is a child, because the narrator is simultaneously Ruby-as-a-child and some older version of Ruby looking back. Don't worry, Ruby-looking-back is also responsible for many cutesy asides. Some of the cutesy asides are just irritating because they're not necessary--"Buck and Bunty! What a wonderful-sounding couple they would have made--I can almost see them." Others are terrible puns/references: "Auntie Babs prides herself on being a good cook and suffers none of the Strindbergian gloom that Bunty experiences when cooking. (Or perhaps it's Ibsenesque--perhaps Bunty is also trapped in a doll's house? Just a thought.)" I can't believe that other people were able to wade through this writing without going crazy.
Also, the secret about her past that Ruby doesn't know is pretty obvious almost immediately. Atkinson insults the reader's intelligence for hundreds of pages with crap like "My Gillian, my pearl;" I mean, how stupid do you have to be to not get that? The only thing I can think of is that this is supposed to be similar to Ruby not knowing what Durex is--the reader is supposed to know something Ruby doesn't know, although why Atkinson would want to frustrate her readers so much I don't understand.
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Good debut, light yet poignant, a pleasure to read despite some flaws
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-05-07
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
The action of "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" starts in 1951, when its narrator, Ruby Lennox, upon her conception exclaims "I exist!".
Ruby, a daughter of Bunty and George, tells the story of her life from the very beginning until adulthood. Her family - the parents and two elder sisters, Gillian and Patricia, live in York, in an apartment, which Ruby calls "Above the Shop" - as owners of a small pet store. Each family member is a character, from always upset, embittered Bunty, openly fornicating George, malicious Gillian who meets her tragic fate too soon, to the oldest sister, Patricia, a teenage rebel who turns out the sane, independent woman following her own path after cutting all her ties with the family.
The main narrative is woven around the "Footnotes" which alternate with ordinary chapters, but really are full, rich chapters in themselves. The footnotes go back in time, always triggered by some seemingly meaningless item encountered in the main story - a photo, a button - and recall the lives of the maternal side of Ruby's family - her great-grandmother Alice, who one day disappeared from her children's lives and was supposed to be dead (the real events of the day of her disappearance are revealed late in the book, as many other shocking or unexpected details about the Lennoxes), her grandmother Nell, unlucky with her boyfriend choices and finally settling for second best, and -last but not least - her great-aunt Lillian, strong and opinionated, living her life to the fullest. I liked the structure of this novel, Ruby's brisk, eloquent, flowing sentences, the dark humor, showing nonchalantly throughout the whole book, the brilliant portrayal of the English people of this complicated, yet average family living during the long and variegated decades of the twentieth century. I also liked, and pondered on, the different shades of grief shown her - perhaps the most important theme throughout the whole novel.
The two facets of the novel, the present and the past of the Lennox family are firmly placed in history. The background of pre-war England and the torrents of World War II are essential to the developments in the family, and at the same time round up the novel and make it wholesome and rich. A plethora of secondary characters, who are, nevertheless, fully developed (like Auntie Doreen, a beautiful portrait), and unexpectedly connect with the Lennoxes, is a plus in my opinion. The prose flows smoothly, the novel is absorbing and hard to put down.
I agree with the previous reviewers on two faults of this novel. First, Ruby's omniscience from fetal life and her incredible eloquence and knowledge, are funny when contrasted with the fact that she is still a child and much of her thinking is characteristic for a child (imagination, her own creative visions of the Cupboard and explanations of things she does not understand, her confusion and enthusiasm for life...), and fun to read, but not very believable. This is not so bad though, it is a question of style and Atkinson's style is original and fresh, largely because of Ruby's voice. Second, much worse in my opinion, is the introduction of the most shocking news in the novel. I agree it is a gimmick and made the story "too much" for my taste - it just went over the edge, while without it the novel had a chance to be really perfect. There were just enough secrets and just enough ends that come together, without the central revelation. This is a pity, but considering it was a long-form debut, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" deserved the Whitbread prize and deserves the four stars I give it.
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Haunting hat trick - surreal and yet real; hyper tragic yet heartwarming
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-05-03
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is a weird and wonderful and amazingly talented bit of writing. I'm not surprised to see the controversy in the reviews here on Amazon. Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a difficult story emotionally - and uses some extremely unconventional tropes and techniques that can be hard to swallow. But it is a brilliant depiction of family dynamics, English culture, and the weird twisted nature of love.
The first hard to swallow trope is the omniscient fetus. Fetal Ruby Lennox has complete awareness of her mother's thoughts and emotions and full vision of the world around her mother - not to mention an excellent grasp of the English language (and even a good background in modernist literature - Ibsen and Strindberg are specifically cited by the fetus (!)) It's tough to get behind this - but I chose to suspend my issues and go with it. Fortunately that part ends very soon.
The second tough to follow aspect is the footnotes section that follows each chapter - really a whole separate chapter that takes place in a different time and generation - but relates thematically in often cryptic way. This weaving back and forth among the generations gives the novel a meandering feel - and takes some of the wind out of the sails of the narrative flow - but something is also gained. By braiding the different narratives across time, it adds to the emotional impact when they come together.
My third big issue with this book is that the coincidences of long lost family members showing up as unrelated characters takes on a bit of a ridiculous quality in the final moments of the book. Atkinson uses lost family members to good effect earlier. She manages to throw in one more at the end who shows up (unknown to any of the characters - but known to the reader) as a nurse at a final deathbed scene and I just felt it was too much. If I were the editor I would have recommended cutting that one.
If you look past the distracting mannerisms of these issues you are rewarded with a brilliant representation of history and family dynamics. Poverty, war, love, abuse, all impact the lives of - particularly - the wives and daughters of this family and produce some thoroughly believable and familiar characters. The emotionally distracted, sometimes adulterous, bad mother is pretty familiar to a lot of people in life. I have never met this character better portrayed than Bunty is here. The dynamics amongst sisters is also spot on. Not since Stephen King have I admired realism in kid dialog so much.
Even better is the miraculous way the narrative braids and interrelates across generations. Atkinson manages to complicate the narrative every time it seems wrapped up a in a bow. A couple of these complications come across as shocking haunting revelations. Atkinson's vision is brilliant and stays with you long after you finish this book. That's my bottom line for a good novel. The central theme is trauma and then recovery (and sometimes redemption). Some have complained there's too much tragedy in this book. They should read some English history. The last hundred years of European history is soaked in blood. Sure it hurts to get to know characters who go through the horrors of the first and second world wars. I'm sure there are plenty of families with body counts similar to the Lennox's across the generations. It's pretty silly to argue historical validity in a novel that's basically magical realist. There's a lot of death and emotional trauma in this book. How the surviving carry on - sometimes by recovering and sometimes by bearing emotional scars - is the central theme of this book and it had a lot to teach me. Some have complained about the neutral, almost uncaring tone of the narrative when presenting the violent scenes. I have to admit I loved this tone. It makes the tragedy much easier to take - and it also serves the narrative. Detachment and repression are basic human survival mechanisms to trauma. The general thrust is ultimately redemptive, however - and this book accentuates the positive, particularly in the end.
Ultimately, while I acknowledge some flaws, I conclude that this novel breaks new ground and creates a new style. It's a towering achievement and really great read. Normally I'd consider the flaws and give such a book 4 stars - but I feel this is really 4.5 stars and deserves the 5th to counter the low rating by those that didn't get it.
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