Christmas Panto: Behind the Scenes?

 

We are in the middle of the annual Clothes in Books trope of Christmas in Books: seasonal scenes from random books, for no better reason than I like looking for the pictures, and I and some readers find them cheery and Xmas-y - particularly, of course, those books featuring murders and - as with this one - other miseries 

 

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

published 1995

 

[1959: The Lennox family goes to the pantomime on Christmas Eve, to see Hansel and Gretel]

‘She’s behind you! She’s behind you!’ Gillian yells with abandon. (She means the wicked witch but I fear that it’s sweet death in all her gauzy splendour)

‘Shush,’ Bunty whispers, her freshly rose-budded lips pouting primly. ‘Not so loud, someone will hear you.’

The absurdity of this statement is not lost on Gillian who can see the whole theatre is in uproar as the witch, an elf, a panda, a cow and a plucky village youth rush about the state while Hansel and Gretel hide under a pile of leaves…

When they ask for volunteers from the audience to come on stage I sink into my seat as far out of sight as possible, and Patricia has rendered herself completely invisible, but there’s no holding Gillian back and before you can say ‘Oh yes she is’, she’s kicking up her white kid heels and layers of petticoats and is on stage, charming the panda and singing her heart out.

 

comments It’s nearly 30 years since this book was first published, and it’s hard now to remember how unusual it was. After a recent reread I found a fascinating article by Hilary Mantel from the London Review of Books. (It’s here, with some restrictions, but well worth trying to reach it). She was considerably put out by the way the book and its author had been portrayed, and she starts as she means to go on:

On the day after Kate Atkinson’s first novel won the Whitbread Prize, the Guardian’s headline read: ‘Rushdie makes it a losing double.’ Thus Rushdie is reminded of his disappointments, Atkinson gets no credit, and the uninformed reader assumes that this year’s Whitbread is a damp squib. But read on. ‘A 44-year-old chambermaid won one of Britain’s leading literary awards last night.’ Was this the Guardian? Was this 1996? One felt spun back in time to, say, 1956.

 

Mantel then explains just why the Atkinson book was a worthy prizewinner: pointing out that it is full-on literary fiction but also funny, entertaining, readable and deals with women’s lives, and working-class lives, in a way that was hard to find at that date.

 

It is a very clever book, with a fascinating structure and (as is true with all  her books) apparent chaos has been worked out very carefully. This one has multiple timelines, huge families, footnotes that go on for pages, a child who remembers her own conception… You have to take a deep breath, dive in and keep going. The story will get you in the end.

 

The book is horribly funny, even when (because?) everything is going wrong, with some memorable holidays and outings. When the children can choose cakes from a bakers’ we get this:

 

Auntie Babs, Auntie Gladys and Bunty – the invisible Greek chorus in our heads – throw their hands up in horror exclaiming, ‘Shop-bought!’ but do we care? No we don’t.

 

[Earlier this year I blogged on names in books, with many many readers joining in, and you absolutely can’t fault Atkinson’s choices of names for her characters.]

 

I think her books got better as she went on, and you can find several of them on the blog, there is a tag below, though many people still think this was her masterpiece. (There was a new Jackson Brodie book out this year also.)

 

This trip to the pantomime is going to go as well as everything else in this family, ie badly. At least Gillian got to enjoy the performance. Hansel and Gretel is forever a fairytale about lost children, which is plainly why Atkinson picked it for this plot turn.

 

‘Explaining panto’ is something I have tried to do over the years in Christmas entries, and I am particularly fond of this photo of a pantomime dame, from the Tyne and Wear archives.  I said when I used it before ‘the fact that the dame is carrying a sports trophy won by the local soccer team somehow represents the nature of panto in the local culture – its importance, its universality, but its very local feel….The caption reads: Photograph of Reggie Dixon in pantomime at the Empire Theatre Sunderland. He is holding a trophy. The trophy is the F.A. Cup won by Sunderland Football team. (This would pretty much date it to 1973.)’ More by clicking on the tag below.

For interest, other books published in 1995 include Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and Rohinton Mistry’s a Fine Balance – both wonderful memorable books, couldn’t be more different from each other. Philip Pullman published the first of his His Dark Materials books.

The Salman Rushdie book mentioned by Mantel is The Moor’s Last Sigh.

Eternal blog favourite Bridget Jones started appearing in a newspaper column in 1995, and the first book version came out in 1996 – another book that would help change how women’s writing was perceived.