kate atkinson behind the scenes at the museum review

The story of Ruby’s great-grandmother Alice, who runs off to France with a travelling photographer is particularly poignant.

We learn of her grandmother Nell’s attempts to find a husband in WW1, her great-aunt Ada’s death from diphtheria aged just 12 and her own mother Bunty’s attempts to make something of her life during WW2, only to be continually and perpetually disappointed.

Laced in and out of Ruby’s tale are other stories from her family history, condensed tales that often could be novels in their own right. She recounts her story, from birth, through childhood and school, significant world events and on to adulthood. The youngest child of unhappy Bunty and adulterous George, Ruby is silent and watchful, at the mercy of sisters Gillian and Patricia yet able to see through everyone. Echoing another child of York, Tristram Shandy, the book opens at the moment of her conception. It’s a perfect marriage of form and narrative as this family saga of four generations reminds us that we are where we have come from, the past is always closer than we think and family secrets have a way of resurfacing no matter how well we believe them to be buried. The reader doesn’t follow the path of the Lennox family, rather we are taken on a grand waltz, swirling and dancing with different partners but always brought back to Ruby. Vividly and evocatively a whole family of Lennox women appear to exist simultaneously in the mind of Ruby, who narrates her own tale of growing up in 1950s York in between ‘Footnotes’, artfully arranged vignettes of the lives of the women who have made her. It’s a good question, because in between these pages, people do come back. Exciting stuff – but how can time be reversible when it gallops forward, clippity-clop and nobody ever comes back. ‘I see it is about ‘the metaphysical ambiguity of reality, time and death and the power of sensation to retrieve memories and reverse time’. In Kate Atkinson’s wonderful family epic, a character is reading À la recherché du temps perdu by Marcel Proust and Ruby Lennox, our narrator notes, As always with Reading Roulette, you picked an amazing book for me to read and I only hope I can capture a hint of what I loved about it. I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but sometimes when I read a book that I have loved, I find it very hard to write a review that I feel will do it justice.

Kate atkinson behind the scenes at the museum review