"Behind the Scenes at the Museum" by Kate Atkinson

 

A wide-ranging family saga, alternating family history with the bildungsroman of a girl growing up above a pet shop in "one of the ancient streets that cower beneath the looming dominance of York Minster" (Ch 1).

The main thrust of the novel is narrated by Ruby in the present tense and describes her childhood (it starts at the moment of her conception in what is presumably a deliberate reference to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, an author cited two pages later) into adulthood within a dysfunctional family consisting of father George who has repeated affairs, mother Bunty who is eternally fed-up and particularly dislikes Ruby, clever but disaffected eldest sister Patricia, and permanently angry and violent elder sister Gillian. The extensions of the family - uncles and aunts and cousins and in-laws - are equally eccentric. 

And so we embark on a roller-coaster ride from tragedy to comedy and back again. Ruby, as a little girl and the youngest of the family, never quite understands what's going on, particularly about the family secret that is dripped into the narrative. She's always one step behind and wondering why (she wonders about so many things, for example: "Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears ...?  Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?"; Ch 9)

There are moments of hilarity. My favourites were the Scottish holiday from hell featuring two couples and an adultery, and a nightmarish wedding on the day that England won the FIFA Men's World Cup.

The main narrative is interleaved with what are called footnotes (although they range from a page or two to chapter length) told in the omniscient past tense. These are episodes in the family history. If you encounter Tristram Shandy at the start, I guess you must expect digression. I presume this added material is designed to show that even the behaviours of Ruby's family have genetic roots: the common themes seem to be adultery, disappearance and death and the fundamental uselessness of most of the menfolk. However, I found these excursions distracted me from the main narrative.

They weren't necessary. Ruby is a delightful character with a strong voice and an always-entertaining family. In the end I wasn't sure if I had finished a comic novel or a family saga (back to Sterne) but I was certain that I had enjoyed myself.

Selected quotes:

• "Given free choice from the catalogue offered by the empire of dreams on her first night as my mother, Bunty has chosen dustbins." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty feels there's something indulgent about parks, something wasteful - holes in existence filled with nothing but air and light and birds." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty's attitude to pain, or indeed, emotion of any kind,is to behave as if it sprang from a personality disorder." (Ch 1)
• "She likes the word 'acquaintance'. It sounds posh and doesn't have all the time-consuming consequences of friendship." (Ch 1)
• "Her eyebrows have risen so far they seem to be hovering above her head." (Ch 6)
• "Monsieur Armand mumbled something to the effect that she would only be able to sell her body if her lips were sewn together." (Fn 9)
• "Patricia ... is sitting by the bedside with a kind of stunned look on her face as if the last thing she was expecting from a death-bed was death itself." (Ch 13)
• "Sandra has put on a lot of weight in the intervening years and is throwing most of it about." (Ch 13)

The book won the 1995 Whitbread Debut Novel Award

January 2025; 382 pages

• Originally published by Doubleday in 1995
• My Black Swan paperback was issued in 1996

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Black Cake" by Charmaine Wilkerson

 When Benny and her big brother Byron attend the reading of their mother's will, they little realise that they will hear a story about a missing sister and a murder. Jumping backwards and forwards across time and from the Caribbean to the UK and to the USA, this novel reveals the secrets of the mother's (and their father's) past and, eventually, reveals whodunnit.

Although, close to the end, there was a moment when I got a lump in my throat, for the vast majority of this book I didn't really care about these people and their convoluted histories. I think the problem was this this was a novel driven first by issues (black men in the US fear the traffic police, black men get discriminated against at work, women are raped, women are coerced into relationships, women are sometimes forced to give up their babies, sugar is linked to slavery, foods that are seen as 'belonging' to a certain region often don't etc) and this led to the primacy of plot over character. A lot happens in this book. And because a lot has to happen there had to be a lot of characters. And because some of the characters have secrets, the story has to be told from a number of points of view (at least eleven of them get to speak). Therefore, the author has adopted the technique of 'head hopping': switching from narrator to narrator. The narrative is fragmented into a lot of very short sections, told from different PoVs. But, except for one or two moments when a specific word was dropped in, the voices of each of the characters sounded identical. The author tells us what is happening, sometimes she even explains the thought processes of the character narrating, but I never felt that I was inside the head of whoever was narrating; I never felt that I saw what was happening through the eyes of the character narrating, except in the most superficial sense.  And, as a result, I never felt that any character was at all real. That's why I didn't care about the characters and, this in turn meant that although I understood the arguments, I didn't have any emotional connection to the issues.

Several of the characters are, in any case, too good to be true. Of course Byron is "the African American social media darling of the ocean sciences" (he's also a "brainy athlete"). Of course one of his mother's friends becomes a world-record holder for endurance swimming. Of course his half-sister is another social media and TV star, this time for cooking, who wipes the floor on live TV with a "coffee guru". These are the sort of people we all meet every day of our lives.

Of course, it is a "New York Times bestseller": book buyers in New York don't seem to want character-driven narratives. It has a strong, fast-paced and intricate plot, but because of the thin and sometimes stereotyped characterisations, it lacked verisimilitude and I found it shallow and superficial.

The point was made in my book group that, despite being purportedly anti-racist, the image portrayed of the Chinese characters is negative and stereotyped, perhaps reflecting an unconscious bias on the part of the author.

Selected quotes:

• "Her satin-covered shoes lay strewn on the lawn outside like tiny capsized boats." (Prologue: Then 1965)
• "A chubby, squiggle-headed baby girl following him around the house" (Part One: Now: 2018)
• "The delicate mechanics of having to work for a living"
• "Eleanor had lied to her husband for all these years because she understood that is you wanted someone to keep loving you, you couldn't ask them to bear all of your burdens, couldn't risk letting them see all of who you were. No one really wanted to know another person that well." (Part Three: Decency)

June 2023; 416 pages (but actually shorter because of the fragmented narrative)

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A spool of blue thread" by Anne Tyler

Shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize and the 2015 Women's Prize for fiction.

This book starts with a great hook: Red and Abby get a phone call from their son nineteen-year-old Denny who is travelling they don't know where to tell them he is gay (and then immediately to disconnect the call). There follows a brilliant dialogue between to two parents in which the wife blames the father for the way he handled the call, his failure to install caller id (and by the time they get round to last number redial someone else has already called), the way his manner drove Denny away etc. The wonderful start than moves to wonder about what is wrong with Denny, the child who never seemed to belong in the family, who got his girlfriend pregnant before his parents realised he had a girlfriend, who couldn't finish college or hold down a job, who drifted away and never told them where he was, who always seemed to harbour grudges and resentments. From there we find out about the family and it begins to drift through the generations.

So we learn about the kids and the grandkids and the parents and the grandparents. Each of them has their own particular story. I suppose a lot of it is about how life doesn't quite deliver what you thought it might.It is about strong-minded women make the running and how men are always trying to boss them about but in the end they always fall into line. In fact the women really do rule the roost, in little things and in big things. I was particularly struck how one matriarch fulfilled her childhood dream of having four children even if she had to resort to secret underhand tactics. And how another seduced her man when she was thirteen and he twenty six and then pursued him and captured him five years later. In many ways the men, so proud of their handiwork and so determined to be boss, were puppets in the hands of women who knew exactly what they wanted.

But there is no obvious plot, it just wanders around behind the interesting personalities without ever really going anywhere. I got excited when a very significant death occurs bang in the centre of the book (47.7% of the way through) so that I thought I had finally arrived at some sort of structure but then it meandered backwards and forwards through the generations and the predictions I was making about revelations to come never came true.

But there is some wonderful writing. There are two brilliant set pieces, one that discussion right at the start and the second a brilliant discussion in the aftermath of a family death. And the characterisations are fantastic.  In many ways it is a perfect reflection of life and, like life too, there are many threads left hanging.

Selected quotes:

• "Trey thinks she hung the moon." (p 68)
• "When she walked her hem fluttered around her calves in a liquid, slow-motion way that made every man stop dead in his tracks and stare." (p 97)
• "Independent? Bosh. That's just another word for selfish." (p 172)
• "It's stiff-backed people like you who end up being the biggest burdens." (p 173)
• "We're young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we're old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end." (p 211)
• "Didn't anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot" (p 217)
• "People never seem to bring liquor when somebody dies, have you noticed? Why not a case of beer? Or a bottle of really good wine? Just these everlasting casseroles." (p 227)
• "She had assumed, till now, that her ultimate goal in life was a husband and four children and a comfortable house" (p 297)
• "It wasn't only the disadvantaged that needed compassion." (p 298)
• "He could shoot a splinter of sadness straight through her." (p 298)
• "Most people who seem scary are just sad." (p 308)
• "I might could tell you where you would find him." (p 387)
• "Lord it over him, would she! She must really think she had his number!" (p 418)
• "He didn't quite make the grade. And it was assumed to be his own fault, because he lived in a nation where theoretically, he could make the grade." (p 425)

Wonderful characters. What is particularly nice is their inconsistencies. It adds to their complexities.

Here are the answers to some of the questions asked at my reading group. Some spoilers here!
1. We don't learn the full significance of the title until page 350. How did this delay make the metaphor more powerful?
A spool of blue thread spills out of the sewing basket as Denny is mending Red's funeral clothes after Abby's death. Denny thinks this means that the spirit of his mum is trying to communicate with him. So is this thread a metaphor for the family line? But a key point is that the family line isn't a bloodline; to Abby who has 'bouhgt' the child, Stem is 'as much' her son as Denny is (although Denny clearly resents this fact and doesn't see Stem as having the entitlement of fully belonging to the family). So, as with much of this novel, the question is asked by the answer is mumbled.

2. How does Tyler use shifts in time to reveal character and change the reader's perception?
This must be to do with the way the book is pivoted around Abby's death which a chronological book couldn't. It is interesting that the document showing Abby's illegal and unprincipled 'purchase' of Stem comes so early in the book.

5. The family home as a character.
In many ways the family home is the principle character. Red's father schemed and possibly cheated to acquire the house he had built; to him it represented prosperity and security. But after Abby's death Red is content to leave it.

6. The novel opens and closes with Denny. Is he the main character?
I thought Abby was the main character. She is the centre pivot. But Denny's dissatisfaction with the complacent Whitshanks is important. He represents the antithesis of the house, the restless spirit struggling for freedom when the others all want security and prosperity. It was this that made me suspect that Denny was the son of Dane, the James Dean lookalike who is Abby's first love.

8. Why did Abby fall in love with Red when she saw him counting the tree rings?
Abby had to make a choice between bad boy boyfriend Dane who has asked her to spend the night with him and solid dependable Red and, like many women, she wants it both ways: the fun and sexiness of the free-spirited rebel and the safety of rich Red. This encapsulates the theme of the book.

10. On the train at the end, Denny sits next to a young teenage boy crying quietly. What is the significance of this scene?
Don't know, but it was a haunting image. I think it is Denny.

The reading group had an interesting discussion about this book. Two hated it, one because it was boring and one because it had no plot, it wasn't a 'story'. I can see the force of this argument although I have read a lot of great books which are really just character studies that ask questions about the experiences of living that we all share. It became very clear in the group's at times heated discussions that we really believed in the characters, some of us loving Abby and some of us hating her, Merrick being a "terrible woman" and Red being the quiet axle of the story. I argued strongly that the book did have a structure: Denny is the start and the end and the centrepiece is the death of Abby around which the whole book pivots. But the time shifting does indeed mean that it is not a 'story' in the conventional sense.

What does the book mean? I think it represented the battle within each one of us between the desire to be free and unencumbered, like Denny and the desire to have stability and prosperity, as represented by Red and the house. In the end they lose the house; this is a staple of the human condition: no matter how much security we achieve in the end we die. In the end our adolescent bid for freedom is, like Denny's, doomed; in the end we want to settle down. But the battle is in all of us. Junior, living from day to day and hand to mouth in the depression as a jobbing builder, dreamed of having a proper house in a respectable neighbourhood. Abby, torn between free spirit Dane and tree-ring-counting Red, chooses Red. Stem, the apparently orphaned little boy, has the stablest marriage of all of them.


February 2017; 465 pages

I have now also read Tyler's Vinegar Girl, a very funny observational comedy of modern life loosely based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and A Patchwork Planet, a portrait of life written with warmth and wonder.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God