I’m inviting people to talk about that one book that they feel others should read. This isn’t about promoting a friend’s book or the latest bestseller, this is about celebrating those truly special books, those pieces of wonder that leave their mark. Today, Essie Fox talks about Kate Atkinson’s Behind The Scenes At The Museum.

I am a voracious reader of books, and of many different genres. At various times in my life certain stories have had a profound influence. Perhaps most important in my youth was The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley - the first book that I loaned from the town’s library and the one which led to many dreams about living a fantasy life under the water. In later years that became a theme for my novel, Elijah’s Mermaid - which some have since gone on to describe as a dark Victorian fairytale.

But, when thinking about more recent times, and a novel that might very well have inspired me to take up my own writing pen - to consider that fictional characters could take on a life all of their own, with secrets, lies, and warts and all - well, that book would be Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

Kate Atkinson’s debut novel is witty enough to make you laugh - and sad enough to make you cry. It seemed to speak directly to me, with the main narrator, Ruby Lennox, being born and growing up just a decade or so before myself - but with enough common social factors to make me feel very much at home when experiencing the tumult of her world. The dynamics of a family which might appear as dysfunctional, where photographs of those passed on are almost viewed as icons, where the father is not always present in the way that he perhaps should be, not to mention the hustle and bustle of lives carried on around a shop - it was such a vivid reminder of my own childhood years, when due to certain traumatic events I often stayed with my cousins and aunt who lived in a flat above a shop.

The book plays about with time shifts (though in a more traditional manner than Atkinson’s latest Life after Life - another truly exceptional work). But the way the family’s ancestors are described as alive and engaging is again very poignant to me - with my childhood full of many great aunts (my maternal grandfather was one of twelve siblings, all of whom remained in the same small town) who often regaled any visitors with stories about ‘the olden times’ - tales which brought gossipy past events as clearly to life as if ‘today’.

In those colourful tales many secrets lay, such as the fact that my great grandmother had been locked up in an asylum when she was twenty-eight years old. And yet, no-one ever spoke of that - whether through sadness or through guilt, for she had not been mad at all but had had a terminal brain tumour: a diagnosis only known when she died and an autopsy was performed. When that fact was accidentally revealed I cannot describe the shock I felt - except to say it was much like that I experienced at the time when Atkinson’s fiction exposed some ‘truths’ that actually made me gasp out loud at such a tragic, desperate twist. And the echo of that sad event continues to live inside my heart as if it really did occur, just as my actual great grandmother’s fate continues to haunt my memory.

About Essie Fox:

Essie Fox’s latest Victorian novel, The Goddess and the Thief tells of family secrets and lies, whether in the Punjab in India, or the darkness of English parlours where spiritualists claim to speak with ghosts, and Hindu gods appear in dreams - to tell of deaths and destinies.