Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Galsworthy meets GarcÆa Mçrquez. Heroine Ruby Lennox tells of her maturation in post-war York, England, with lengthy digressions on the previous three generations of her family. Local color, irony and sarcasm abound while mortality hovers in the air like smog. The tone reminds one of magical realism, only the magical is wished for, never delivered. Susan Jameson narrates ably enough. Fully voicing the characters, she chooses to read the narrative rather than impersonate the narrator, thus losing many of the textures of the rich text. She only skims the surface, but she does that very well. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

January 1, 1996
The narrator's insistent voice and breezy delivery animates this enchanting first novel by a British writer who won one of the 1993 Ian St. James Awards for short stories. Ruby Lennox is a quirky, complex character who relates the events of her life and those of her dysfunctional family with equal parts humor, fervor and candor-starting with her moment of conception in York, England, in 1959: ``I exist!'' Ruby then describes the family she is to join. Her parents own a pet shop; her mother, Bunty, bitterly rues having married her philandering husband, George, and daydreams about what her life might have been. Ruby has two older sisters, willful Gillian and melancholy Patricia. Through its ambitious structure, the novel also charts five generations and more than a century of Ruby's family history, as reported in ``footnotes'' that follow relevant chapters. (For example, a passage about a pink glass button reveals the story of its original owner, Ruby's great-grandmother Alice, who will abandon her young family and run off with a French magician.) Ruby's richly imagined account includes both the details of daily life and the several tragic events that punctuate the family's mundane existence. Though the ``footnote'' entries are not quite as gripping as those rendered in Ruby's richly vernacular, energetic recitation, Atkinson's ebullient narrative style captures the troubled Lennox family with wit and poignant accuracy.