Shrines of Gaiety. By Kate Atkinson. Doubleday; 416 pages; $29 and £20
A General Strike looms, however the focus of Kate Atkinson’s exuberant new novel, set in London in 1926, is the seedy, synthetic world of the capital’s nightclubs. Presiding over it’s the formidable Nellie Coker, matriarch of a big brood of largely dissolute grownup youngsters (and based mostly, an afterword reveals, on Kate Meyrick, an actual nightlife doyenne of the Twenties). Over the course of the e book, Nellie’s huge, ill-gotten empire is focused by unscrupulous outsiders and a good, dogged copper.
Ms Atkinson’s award-winning novels embody the “Case Histories” crime collection and a unfastened trilogy set within the early twentieth century that started with “Life After Life”. Her tales usually depict the allotting of rough-and-ready justice and the avenging of misplaced ladies and ill-treated younger girls. And there are lacking ladies aplenty in “Shrines of Gaiety”, to whose destiny the police are largely detached—other than newly appointed Chief Inspector Frobisher.
Spirited off the road into mysterious vehicles, their corpses later pulled from the Thames at a spot often called Dead Man’s Hole, the victims are under-age “hostesses” in theatres or golf equipment, together with Nellie’s fundamental nightspot, the Amethyst. Some are runaways. Freda Murgatroyd, a young person, leaves a sticky state of affairs in her house metropolis of York and persuades her better-heeled pal Florence to accompany her right down to London. They wish to make their fortunes on the stage, however Florence disappears into Soho’s maw: “It was not just like being in a foreign country, it was like being in a hundred foreign countries at once.”
Hot on their path is Gwendolen Kelling, an embodiment of pluck and independence. Recruited by Frobisher to spy on the Coker operation, Gwendolen kinds a bond with Nellie’s eldest son, Niven; he was a soldier on the Western Front, she a nurse. The first world warfare and its losses hang-out the e book, from Gwendolen’s lifeless brothers to Frobisher’s continental spouse, a refugee whose previous traumas shroud her origins and blight their marriage.
Yet that is no gloomy yarn. It froths with all-night events, corrupt policemen, sickly cocktails, swanky vehicles, gossip columnists, playing dens and exquisite garments. Another of Nellie’s sons tries to seize the zeitgeist in a dreadful novel referred to as “The Age of Glitter”, a nod to “Vile Bodies”, Evelyn Waugh’s satire of the period of the Bright Young Things. There are additionally references to fashionable songs of the day, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and the “curse of Tutankhamun” (Egyptology was all the trend after the boy-king’s tomb was found). As the e book hurtles in direction of its twisty climax, Ms Atkinson as soon as once more proves herself to be a consummate entertainer. ■
Source: www.economist.com