Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel (Paperback)

Reading this book, it isn't until the end that you realise what Ruby finally realises: that the individuals in families don't have to get along, they don't have to like eachother, they don't even have to take the same paths in life. But they will always have shared experiences (even if they had no choice in the matter), and somehow this is an indelible bond.

The anecdotes in the book are relayed with genuine feeling - as another reader has said, "tragi-comical" in their subject matter. The characters are brilliantly portrayed - amusing, quirky, selfish people who somehow still manage to have a bond with eachother (though they scarcely realise it). And the reflection on the meaning of family is subtle, not sickening and obvious.

Put simply, this is a moving, and yet highly entertaining book. I would recommend it to anyone that wants more from fiction than a fast-paced, light read.

Here is an example of the text, which is narrated by Ruby, our protagonist. In this chapter she is 11 or 12 years old. She is describing their new neighbors, the Ropers. The Gillian she mentions is her now-dead older sister, Bunty is Ruby's mother and George, Ruby's father.

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"Our new neighbors are Mr Roper, Mrs Roper and their children, Christine, Kenneth and the baby-David. Mr Roper -- Clive -- is an ex-RAF squadron leader who now has some kind of executive job with British Rail -- exactly the kind of man my mother dreams about. And indeed, for several weeks after the Ropers move in at New Year, when Bunty is in her torpid phase, she lets fall a hail of remarks of the 'Why can't you be more like Clive Roper?' variety. These remarks stop with the upturn in Bunty's condition, somewhere around Whit, when she no longer needs George to be more like Mr Roper because she is toying with the original model.

My friendship with Christine Roper is based solely on proximity -- there is no escape from her. She's a year older than me and a particularly bossy girl, in some ways she is more like Gillian than Gillian was, except that she is very plain and Gillian was pretty (althought it's only now that she's dead that I'm willing to say that). Kenneth, my junior by two years, is like a distillation of all the little boys that ever were, a kind of demonstration model -- from the sagging socks to the half-sucked gobstopper in his pocket. He's annoying but harmless. Less so the baby-David, who dribbles from every orifice and is always red in the face from either screaming or doing his 'big jobs' to use Mrs Roper's inelegant phraseology. Mrs Roper (Harriet) isn't really my mother's sort. She's more like a squadron-leader than her husband -- a big, raw-boned woman with an air of certainty about her -- very loud and very English. You expect her to rummage around in her extremely untidy house and produce a lacrosse stick or a riding crop rather than the unprepossessing baby-David -- or his accessory, a swollen breast, pumping with blue veins like a 3-D delta map."

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The book is described as being "darkly comic," though I didn't feel the darkness unless I really paid attention to it as I was reading. There was much hardship in Ruby's family, but the way the story is told, there is so much to smile about that one needn't get bogged down in how depressing it all was.

At the time I read this book, I didn't have the concentration for a complex plot, which may be why I had trouble with the backstory. But, amazingly, the book was a joy even when I didn't know what was happening!

Having finally read the last five pages, I must now move on to other stories. To ease this separation, I've already picked up another of Kate Atkinson's books. I will consider myself fortunate if it is as delightful as this one!