An amazing first novel
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I read this book about 10 years ago on a friend's recommendation and can remember thinking it was an amazing debut novel at the time. I decided to read it again recently, and had completely forgotten the story and so it was like reading it for the first time. I still think it's a great read and so well written that I still find it hard to believe it was Kate Atkinson's first novel. It's very funny and insightful. The story of Ruby Lennox's life, although sometimes tragic, is told in a very humourous way and it's the type of book that makes you want to carry on reading to the end to find out what happens to everyone as the characters are so well developed and really seem like real people. I would definitely recommend this novel and I think I'll be reading some more of Kate Atkinson's books.
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A lovely book
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I have read one Kate Atkinson novel previously and did not find it that grabbing, but this book was recomended to me by many close friends and I loved it!! The story it's self is not a very fast paced one, but the characters are so beautifuly brought to life, that you have to keep reading to find out what happens to them all (there are many characters).
Although the ending was not particularly heart breaking, I found my self having a little sob, as I felt like I'd been with the characters through their heart break, especially Ruby.
I recomend it highly
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Like a good old family gossip
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I love this book: the characters are so warm and alive and it's a wonderful evocation of the period (at least I feel like it is, based on my mum's tales of a 50s/60s Yorkshire childhood!). It's like sitting down with several generations of your family with everyone telling stories about their lives, dragging a few skeletons out of their closets along the way. The quirky style and wry humour just add to its charm.
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Well observed but unsatisfying
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I found this hard to finish. Individual scenes are beautifully observed and written, and the lack of direction in the narrative isn't necessarily a problem: it worked wonderfully for Garrison Keillor in "Lake Wobegon Days", a book with which Behind the Scenes has a great deal in common. But where Keillor's narrator describes the flaws and foibles of his characters with warmth and love, Atkinson's narrators do so with distaste and ill-feeling. This relentless self-centredness and lack of sympathy for any other character (and a nearly universal dislike of the world as a whole) makes her first-person narrator, Ruby, unlikeable too. The total lack of sympathetic characters makes it hard to care about anything that happens. The result was a small-minded, mean-spirited world that I was glad to leave at the end.
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"East Enders (?)" interleaved with history
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I would not have chosen this book but we do often choose books by their cover and this was a book that had an interesting title to pick froma pile from my library reading group options.
There is something of the humour - but of the black sort of Adrian Mole about it, every conversation and scene generally has a nuance of the salacious or vulgar about it although the book has its very bright moment. It is in its totality a grim outlook on the prison of British family life subject to wars, personal failings and a lack of education of affluence. Accurate and moving though it may be the characters - all of them, come across as victims except perhaps the protagonist's elder sister.
Ruby Lennox begins the story from her conception, describing her tiny feet inside her mother at a stage of life when she would have been devoid of them. Each chapter is interleaved with a restrospective chapter examining the lives of the family from the past, usually centered around an artefact of sentimental importance at a later date and how it entered the family circuit as a specimen of some emotional value - e.g., a rabbit's foot, a button, a silver locket. Although written in the first person, Ruby has a supernatural knowledge of her past family history and the intricacies of all the personalities surrounding her - even as a baby, so it is effectively a third person book.
Ruby's mother Bunty comes across as a woman who was never loved properly and cannot love her children. This book reveals a great deal about life in Britain and the attitudes people had - particularly women - the way they did not like shop brought food and had to make their own as a sign of good housewifery. Bunty's husband George is clearly disatisfied by his wife but seems a steady father. The family are in charge of a pet shop and later a pharmacy of sorts after the pet shop tragically burns down through carelessness.
Poignant chapters include those about the first world war and the way it erased a generation of fine men in harrowing circumstances - certainly within this family - and aslo aspects of the blitz and the upheavals of the second world war. About women who lost their sweethearts, never to get them back and had to make second choices of which Bunty was also one.
The social communities described centre around alcohol, pubs, shopkeepers, relatives and parties and events like the coronation - all in all it is a sort of stereotypical British landscape something like the BBC soap East Enders with the constant shananigans especially of maritial infedility, comings of age and individual weaknesses.
The best chapters were on the first world war, a holiday in Whitby where the children are mothered by one of George's lovers. Apart from rosy scenes here, and some interesting history, the narrative of Ruby's own life reads depressingly with gloomy events anticipated, then revisited later with greater details. Details like the pet shop fire or deaths in the family.
The underlying theme of the book for me was splitting. The splitting of Britain and its family by war, death, lack of love, unfulfilled relationships, misunderstandings ... Ruby's life looks promising but she ends up in Edinburgh producing "nut brown" children - and the primordial mother of the story Alice ends up a lost victim incapable of revisiting her abandoned children. Many of the children respond by immigrating including Ruby and her sister Patricia.
This book is probably a pot boiler, useful for social historians and English people may empathise with it - but I don't think the book is complimentary to the English, there is a underlying lack of joy, filled with drink, sex and escapism that haunts the people portrayed. Perhaps this is intentional. There is no particular resolution at the end - and overall it is a depressing book with humour that is often negative and sterotypical.
It was a decent read but not something I would have chosen, or would treasure in my library. Perhaps there are deep underlying lessons and a sort of premonition about what life is really about - a stark lesson than will stir up visions of an other utopia, which the book scarcely guarantees.
The interleaved style of present, past, present, past moving temporally forwards is I think an interesting device and this is a good example of an interlieaved sandwich story - a bit like the Time traveller's wife.
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