![]() "It carried me away with such enormous high spirits." Why such brio in a tale ostensibly full of gloom? Was it because it was one of those first novels that are "easy to write", suggested a reader? Yes, said Atkinson. There was much discussion of a paradox, clearly experienced by most of the readers who spoke: on the one hand, the novel is full of deaths, many of them untimely or tragic (infant deaths, a reader pointed out, crop up in more than one of her novels) on the other hand, as another member of the audience put it, "it was so enjoyable to read something that was written with such joie de vivre". ![]() Only on a second reading was the novelist's scheming clear. Yet, when we asked the audience how many had guessed at the revelation in advance, not a single one claimed to have done so. Some of these clues, she confessed, seemed to her almost too obvious. ![]() Indeed, Atkinson told us that she had gone back on her tracks, making sure that appropriate clues were properly "seeded" (this was, she said, the word that crime writers use) throughout the novel. Atkinson's novel has a revelation near its end, which is intimated at several points earlier in the narrative. When Kate Atkinson came to talk to the Guardian book club about Behind the Scenes at the Museum, we found out something about which a literary critic can usually only speculate. ![]()
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