Black Swan • Modern fiction

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM

by Kate Atkinson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Atkinson was born in York in 1951. She read English at Dundee University and studied for a postgraduate degree. She wrote for many years as a hobby, and won the Woman's Own short story competition in 1988. When she turned 40, she decided to take the leap, got an accountant and concentrated on writing. One of her short stories won the Ian St James award in 1993. When her first novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum was published in 1995, it won the First Novel category of the prestigious Whitbread Awards, and then, amidst great shock and controversy, it was chosen over Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh as the overall Whitbread Book of the Year for 1995. Her second novel, Human Croquet, was published in 1997. She lives in Edinburgh with her two daughters.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Behind the Scenes at the Museum is the story of a working-class (but upwardly mobile) family living in a flat over their pet shop in 1950s York. Ruby Lennox is the knowing, all-seeing narrator, who describes her life from the time she herself is grudgingly conceived by her mother Bunty, thanks to her father's five pints of John Smiths Best Bitter on the eve of the Festival of Britain, and born while her father, George, 'was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster, telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married.'

Here, blithely and wittily told, are all the betrayals, resentments, infidelities, unspoken secrets and tragedies of an ordinary dysfunctional English family, going right back to Ruby's great grandmother who abandoned her family and ran off with an itinerant French photographer, through the carnage of two world wars, taking in every defining moment of the era, from the Coronation to the 1966 World Cup, while describing with black hilarity and cheerful heartbreak the far reaching effects of loss.

INTERVIEW WITH KATE ATKINSON

Here are some soundbites from Kate Atkinson on Behind the Scenes at the Museum which may provide a jumping-off point for discussion:

'I'm pathologically nostalgic. Writing is the act of rescuing the past, even if it's only an imaginary one. I have trouble writing about the present - there's no distance.'

[In answer to the question: Is the novel at all autobiographical?]

' No, I spent a lot of time scribbling in the dark, getting rid of all that autobiographical stuff. The novel is a repository for a network of objects and things, not for my personal feelings - perhaps that's why there are so many cupboards in it.'

On the title, which she says came to her as a dream of walking through the Festival of Britain room at the Castle Museum in York: 'I woke up and thought that is what this book is about - behind the scenes at the museum.'

On being patronisingly labelled an unconscious post-modernist: Atkinson's main aim is for readability, to be entertaining. 'People write to me and say "I loved that book" and I think, what more could anyone want?'

'Making the imagination real, that's what writing is. That's what I like about books, that Wuthering Heights say, is as real as the desk I'm writing at and yet it's entirely a product of Emily Bronte's imagination. It's a kind of validation of self, and maybe some of us need to validate ourselves more than others. "Writing as insecurity: discuss."'

SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. 'Humour makes life easier and more bearable,' Kate Atkinson is quoted as saying. It is arguable that the hilarity and wit that infuse Behind the Scenes at the Museum obscure just how dark and tragic her vision really is.

2. In making Ruby an omniscient, fly-on-the-wall narrator, present at her own conception and birth, Kate Atkinson is teasing the reader into becoming aware of the manipulative power of the storyteller, and the falseness of trusting 'realism' in fiction. She further emphasises this by playing around with shifting time frames. Laurence Sterne did something similar two centuries earlier in Tristram Shandy. It depends on the individual reader how conscious he or she is of this technique while reading the novel, and what it achieves for them.

3. The Daily Mail wrote of Behind the Scenes: 'Truer to life than social history, especially about growing up in the Fifties.' Try relating it to to your own experiences, or those of people you know.

4. Bunty is in many ways a monstrous character, but she demonstrates the impossible expectations of selflessness and self-sacrifice demanded of motherhood in our century. The question is what, if anything, redeems her.

5. The use of the 'Footnotes' - which are a form of historical flashback - is another way in which Kate Atkinson plays with the conventions of the structure and time-frames of the novel. What do you think of this technique, and what it achieves?

6. 'Fearlessness and playfulness' is what Kate Atkinson says influences her in certain other female post-modern American writers. Do you think this novel exemplifies these two attributes?

7. Do you agree with The New York Times Book Review, which wrote about Kate Atkinson: ' The small-town, big-dream novel is one more often associated with North American women novelists, but Kate Atkinson succeeds here in a different context and with only a trace of sentimentality.'

8. Some of the plot elements in Behind the Scenes are well-used staples of the standard popular family saga: for example, the discovery of an old photograph, a flashback, a long-forgotten twin. Yet there are other elements that distinguish this book from the family saga catagory.

9. Hilary Mantel wrote about the fuss after Behind the Scenes emerged as the winner of the Whitbread over Salman Rushdie's novel: 'In its fantastic and magical conceits, its energy and tireless invention, its echoes of dream-worlds and genetic mysteries, [Behind the Scenes] is more like a book by Salman Rushdie than the writers of the lowering headlines could imagine. Like Rushdie's work, it makes most English fiction look chlorotic, green-sick, an exhausted swooner fanning herself in the twilight of a tradition.' And on the other hand: 'Anyone who reads, let's say, Joanna Trollope will be able to read and enjoy Kate Atkinson. Her novel delivers to the populace its jokes and its tragedies as efficiently as Dickens once delivered his.' These are seemingly contradictory comparisons.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne

The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, Fay Weldon

Have the Men had Enough?, Margaret Forster

Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel

The Mistress of Spices, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

The novels of Jane Austen

OTHER BOOKS BY KATE ATKINSON

Human Croquet (Black Swan)

Emotionally Weird (Doubleday)