‘I even miss the parrot.’

This is an aftermath statement which follows on from a devastating domestic fire. ‘Aftermath’ isn’t the word the narrator, Ruby Lennox, uses, but it’s what she means. A fire has consumed her first life, her first setting — the family pet shop that kept and housed the Lennox brood — which included an annoying parrot. Ruby’s voice is winning and alert, pertly displayed on top of the narrative counter. By the time we arrive at this sentence, two thirds into Kate Atkinson’s exuberantly literary novel ( in the tradition of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle), we are sold, completely attached to the vicissitudes of Ruby’s fortune. We care. We care as much as Samuel Pepys did over the razing of London, and this is because Atkinson’s sentences are rich with historical resonance - historical antecedents, literary and historical predecessors - including this annoying green parrot relegated here to an ‘even’, where ‘even’ is an adverb emphasising Ruby’s surprise at her experience of missing this loquacious bird. It’s a lovely sentence, full of emotional antecedents: a close historic past that is still intimately attached to the surprising and precarious present (Sentence from Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson).

For the creative writing students at Oxford Brookes University