Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

I am catching up on some favored authors works that I missed along the way and this is one of them.

This is Kate Atkinson’s first novel, and it is interesting to read it having read Life After Life.  Much like Ursula’s repeated bad luck and multiple deaths in that book, in this one Ruby recounts her life through a series of deaths.  Death in Atkinson’s hands is a blackly comic trickster. Frank, the narrator's grandfather, who survived WWI, perishes when a German plane, having overshot the York railway yards, dumps its bombs on him as he takes a shortcut down an alley.   Some deaths are comically histrionic. Ruby's father, an incorrigible but inept womanizer, dies the death he might have wished, a coital coronary as he inappropriately has sex on the floor with one of the buffet waitresses at a family wedding.

Deaths are constantly foretold. We are told of Ada's sad demise several chapters before it happens. When we hear about Nell's elder brother Lawrence running away to sea, the narrator cannot resist telling us that, after two decades of travel and adventure, he will be blown up by a German mine in the North Sea.  Finally, as Ruby recalls her sister's death, she remembers and adopts the blackly unsentimental manner of her childhood self. She and her other sister, Patricia, look at the Christmas tree and wonder silently how Gillian's presents might be reapportioned. Ruby's coolness in her manner of narrating the novel's deaths is one reason why the novel is funny rather than mournful. But this coolness also has an explanation. A family saga will always have revelations, and near the end of Atkinson's novel we find that not every death has left her protagonist unshaken. There is a secret to be revealed that is not comic at all.