All the World’s a Museum, and all the men and women merely …

It won't surprise my readers that a friend gave me a novel for my birthday this year entitled Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson. When Sophie gave it to me she said she'd seen it and thought of me, but that it was nothing to do with the title. As I started to read the book I agreed. It's a well-written story of four generations in the family of Ruby Lennox, the narrator, told by jumping backwards from a chronological tale of her life. It focuses largely on the women, and I have to say the characters are somewhat irritating, maintaining a conscious blindness to their own and others' emotions.

Yet, as the story builds and weaves you develop an understanding of how Ruby's family could have developed no other way. The back story is established through a series of 'footnotes' to each chapter in Ruby's life, which use a throw-away reference in the text to link to a past family story. Overwhelmingly these references are objects: a lucky rabbit's paw, a pair of boots, a zeppelin. Things are also significant to the points of revelation in the story where we learn the darker history of the Lennox women: from photos, jewellery, clocks and soft toys. At the crisis point when Ruby remembers forgotten trauma from her childhood, she even imagines her life as a full lost property cupboard in which she is lost.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum gives the sense in which these women's lives were lived variously behind facades of oblivion, misery, duty or amnesia, much more stored up out of view than they will (or can) put on display. Wikipedia informs me that 'the Museum' is York Castle, which features period house facades like the ones behind which the Lennox lives are played out. But I feel this closes down the significance of the title. The moral for Ruby, it seems to me, is that it is only things that you can trust to remember a painful and complex human history.