First, the title. I had a dream in the early stages of writing the book - long before any publisher or agent was interested and when it was still a small handful of random chapters - and in the dream I was in the Castle Museum in York, on my own, in the middle of the night. Although it was dark and frightening, I was compelled to investigate (as we are in dreams) and, as I moved from room to room in the museum, objects sprang into life - a fire suddenly flared in a hearth, an automaton began to move.
When I woke up I immediately thought, "that dream was called Behind the Scenes at the Museum". My second thought was more revelatory: "Of course, that's what the novel should be called." I rarely remember dreams, let alone give them titles, but I presume that my unconscious self (not usually so lucid or so obviously helpful) was engaged at some deep level in the "writing process", as we glibly call it - as if sentences roll out smoothly on a factory production line rather than being manually wrought in a hellishly tedious part of the brain.
Looking at Behind the Scenes now, I can see that York, not Ruby, is the all-pervading main character of this book. The novel is a hymn to my relationship with the city, constructed out of history, memory and nostalgia.
I doubt it was incidental that the Castle Museum provided the backdrop for this dream. I visited it regularly from an early age, walking with my father from our shop, which, like the Lennoxes' shop that rose from the ashes of the Great Pet Shop Fire, sold medical and surgical supplies and was similarly located in Stonegate, the old Roman Via Pretoria stretching from the river to the headquarters of the Ninth Legion, now buried beneath the Minster. That walk took us through ancient streets so freighted with history that they can barely carry the burden. My father knew every shortcut there was, and those secret snickets and alleyways are an old and familiar groove in my brain.
The museum was a place of miracles and wonders for me, where the rooms and streets of the past were brought to life in a way that was (and still is) thrilling. My imagination was undoubtedly nurtured by those visits; in fact I am sure that they helped to build the foundations of my becoming a writer. (The other foundation, of course, was being an early and avid reader. Like Ruby, the first book that I read by myself, when I was barely four, was The Ladybird Book of Puppies and Kittens
The Castle Museum is located in two former prisons, the debtors' prison and the women's, and was founded by Dr John Kirk, a North Yorkshire country doctor who (and I'm reading here from the museum's website) collected everyday objects and wanted to keep them safe for future generations. Which for me would be a pretty good description of Behind the Scenes
If you were to ask me what the book is about (the most loathsome question you could ask - why bother to write the thing if you then have to explain it? It is what it is) and I was forced to answer, I would say, "It's about things." The book is a repository for the past, for mine, for other people's, for the city's, a place of safekeeping for the fragile. (The Lost Property Cupboard of the book is a deeply held belief of mine. Everything Will Be Returned at the End.) The book saves things that might otherwise be lost, it gives them a value, just as the footnotes of the book - a rabbit's foot, a glass button - represent so much more than they appear to.
I did an event at the museum in Edinburgh a few months ago at which I brought in objects relevant to the coronation chapter of the novel - a photograph of me aged two with the television set on which my family watched the coronation, my coronation mug and coins, and so on. It seemed appropriate for a reading in a museum. It was very enjoyable, although a little like reminiscence therapy for everyone concerned. "Thank you so much," a woman in Canada said to me years ago, "for remembering the red plastic tulip given away with Daz." Not just the red plastic tulip but also my Queen Anne Grammar School uniform list from 1963; my grandfather's death (hit by a stray bomb in 1942 after surviving the great war unscathed); every book I have ever read; my intense, Winnicottian love for Teddy; my only-child sense of isolation - they are all (and so much more) in there. I am not Ruby Lennox, but she is me. Her story isn't mine but the book is, in its own way, my own museum.
The beginning of the book is a nod to Tristram Shandy (Sterne wrote it in York, the first copies were sold in Stonegate), and here I am, Shandy-wise, more or less back where I started, having never really gone anywhere. And, of course, it's not about York, or things or museums; like Tristram Shandy, like all literature, it's about the journey of the self towards the light.
• Next week, John Mullan will discuss readers' responses to the novel
