As most of you who ‘read’ my ramblings here already know, Kate Atkinson is my favourite contemporary English novelist. From the moment I started reading the first pages of one of her books, I felt she had something profound to say about life and people’s views. I read Behind The Scenes At The Museum a few years ago but I decided to read it again in the last couple of weeks, as I thought that now after a few more years spent in this beautiful city of York, I could get a deeper meaning of the story. And I was right as I have enjoyed this second time more than the first. In this novel, Kate Atkinson has created one of the most original first person narrators of recent years. Her character, Ruby Lennox, is at once witty, fragile, sad, and sassy. Ruby's sharp eye for detail, and the way in which she brings alive the interior and exterior fabric of her life through her voice, engages us with its immediacy.
The novel begins with Ruby's conception in 1951, charts her exit from the warmth and safety of her mother's body, and her arrival into a very strange and alienating world. Her family is eccentric but engaging, living above the pet shop in York that they own and run. Her parents, Bunty and George, are well meaning, but have cracks in their psyches that play themselves out through interactions with their children. Ruby is not an only child: her older sisters Patricia and Gillian are her constant companions, as bizarre as their parents. The novel takes us through the early part of Ruby's life, constructing a magical world where the strangest events seem inevitable and manageable. Increasingly Ruby becomes aware that there is something about her family that she is not being told and, in a brilliantly realized moment of revelation, Kate Atkinson allows Ruby to discover what that secret is, then we watch her come to terms with it.
The past is a strong presence here. Kate Atkinson tells much of the quirky family history through separate chapters called "Footnotes", which take us back to pre-Ruby days, and they do much to explain why her family is as it is, and why Ruby develops as she does.
This novel is never predictable, constantly delighting by the way that Ruby's world-weary sardonic view of adults is wittily expressed. The independence of the voice here is powerful and new. Kate has found a way to express the young Ruby's viewpoint without sacrificing the older Ruby's knowledge. This achievement means that even within the grimmest passages of the novel there lurks a longing for the past, and an irrepressible need to find the humor and humanity in every situation. In the narrative, for example, Ruby's parents let her down in many ways, but they are never less than loved, and the older Ruby never lets us forget that fact.
The vigor and passion of this book comes from the language and the forcefulness of its life-affirming voice. At no time do we think that Ruby's life is easy, yet her resilience and refusal to be miserable carries us on with her. The novel begins with Ruby declaring "I exist!" and ends with the words "I am Ruby Lennox." The pages in between the two statements justify the second completely. By the time we reach it, we know exactly who Ruby Lennox is, and we feel reluctant to leave her. This is a mark of Kate Atkinson's success: she has made us love her character.
