The detail from the past comes after the episode in the present that it elucidates. Ruby's narrative refers us in brackets to such footnotes for background to her story, but she always refers us to a footnote that we have yet to read. Here is a whole potential novel in 10 parenthetic pages. Years later, she tries desperately but unsuccessfully to find them again, and when, as an old woman, she is killed in a German bombing raid, she is found with an old photograph of them clutched to her. She leaves her six children behind for a life spent regretting having done so. Near the end of the novel, for instance, we get the capsule story of Ruby's great-grandmother Alice, who flees her drunkard husband with an itinerant French photographer. Many of the footnotes condense narratives that could be agonising if stretched out. The novel does not march us down the decades like most sagas, but recovers the past in a series of "footnotes", artfully arranged to solve mysteries only in the novelist's good time.
For while it will remind you of what you have forgotten in earlier chapters, it also reveals every secret that Atkinson has withheld, every surprising turn of her plot. Yet perhaps the reader who is in the middle of the book should hesitate before downloading this guide. (You can actually find one at /kateatkinson14/behind.htm.) The saga spans four generations of the narrator's family, with a cast too large to be held easily in the memory. Really attentive readers of Atkinson's novel might themselves feel in need of just such a family tree. Throughout the novel, lost family members turn up in the story. Patricia has herself been long-lost, walking out of the family home after having a child as a teenager, and turning up many years (and several chapters) later in Australia, married with two children. Patricia's "thirst for genealogy" is shared by her creator, for the novel fictionally recovers the lost stories of Ruby's relations. O n almost the last page of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Atkinson's protagonist and narrator Ruby Lennox tells us that her sister Patricia has paid someone to draw their family tree - "a huge, chaotic arboretum".
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