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.