Behind the Scenes at the Museum

I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. On the one hand, it is a beautifully written, moving (if depressing) and thorough account of three generations surviving in the face of death, infidelity and alienation. On the other hand, after 300 pages, a reader gets bored of every female character getting pregnant, running away from home and/or marrying an emotionally distance if not frankly abusive husband and regretting her life. It ends up feeling flat at best and at worst, a little misogynistic that even the smartest female characters get entangled in such things.

On a practical level, the intertwined narratives of many generations playing through the same script are very hard to keep straight, and I ended up needing a diagram to remember if Frank was Nell's husband or Alice's and how exactly Edmund was related to Bunty and who exactly Betty was, again? I get the parallels Atkinson is trying to draw, but they work better when she gives the characters enough individuality that the reader can keep them straight.

The true redeeming aspect of the novel is Ruby – the protagonist. Her thoughts are vivid, full of metaphor and symbolism and yet relatable. The book truly shines in Ruby's nightmares – inchoate end of the world fantasies, in which the familiar twists with a certainty of catastrophe – and the way in which they mature with Ruby. These nightmares reflect the heart of Atkinson's narrative – the way in which the families are both familiar and yet ill-meaning, self-involved and chaotic, which she does equally skillfully.

A compulsive read, which is rare. I enjoyed the narrative alternating between Ruby Lennox, who was a spectacular narrator (almost all the way) throughout, and the story of Ruby's family. Atkinson uses a technique where she flashes forward and sometimes backward as introduces characters into books that I've always enjoyed - perfect for a reader who hates foreshadowing. My only quibble was her wrapping everything up in the end and Ruby the adult wasn't as interesting a narrator as Ruby the child. On one hand it was nice to find out certain things, on the other hand I really didn't need to know. Still, one of my best reads of the year and I suspect it will keep that status.

Considering that this was Atkinson's debut novel, it's interesting to read it after having read several of her later books. There are themes and tricks that she'll return to, and like later books this is a sprawling family saga covering both world wars and the often tragic consequences thereof. Superb writing.

I had a hard time getting into this book, starting and then putting it down several years ago until I decided to give it a go again after reading about it in Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Novel. In the end I'm glad I did. It was confusing to keep track of everyone the way she jumps back and forth in time, but the writing style grew on me and I ended up underlining sentences in almost every chapter that spoke to me or that were so beautifully done I had to recognize them in some way. I'd give it 3-1/2 stars if I knew how to half a star.