Shrines of Gaiety revolves around this grimy power struggle, and yet is—outwardly at least—Ms. Atkinson’s airiest creation to date. A feather-light confection of intersecting dramas that recalls the antic comedies of P.G. Wodehouse, the novel has it all: a runaway teenager, a sleuthing ex-librarian, a dogged Chief Inspector, even a stash of purloined jewels. There is the perfect balance throughout of sweetness and heartbreak ... And, as always, there is the unmistakable zest of Ms. Atkinson’s dry wit ... t is hard to think of another writer who can flit from darkness to levity, often in a single sentence, without lapsing into coyness or cynicism...Ms. Atkinson has perfected the comic wizardry that keeps us both airborne and immersed in her mosaic-like narratives ... if such scenes border on farce—just as some of the novel’s dialogue veers toward archness—this only accentuates the underlying darkness. For here, once again, with nonchalant dexterity, Ms. Atkinson has depicted a world ripped apart by war and a city still emerging from the shroud of 'muffled mourning.'
Atkinson vividly conjures the post-Great War London of a century ago, a vast stinking metropolis still teetering between the old world and the new ... At the same time, Shrines tends to reduce a city of millions to the neatly sealed aperture of its two dozen or so players, many of whom meet in back alleys and grand townhomes alike with improbable frequency. Stood beside her previous novels, the book can seem like a minor work in a catalog already stacked with greatest hits; a kind of fond genre exercise the author has undertaken simply because she can. Even her descriptions of sex and transgression, the orgies and dead girls and opium dens, remain reassuringly bright, almost cozy ... That tangible warmth suffuses her storytelling ... For all its dips into sentiment and cliché — Atkinson has a weakness for wordplay and extended nautical metaphors — she remains a keenly sympathetic observer of human foibles, one who can sketch a character in one quicksilver sentence ... doesn’t surprise in the thrilling sui generis...no thunderclap revelations à la Case Histories arrive in the flurry of postscripts and ever-afters that make up its final pages. It lands instead as light refreshment; a cocktail of fizz and melancholy, generously poured.
If Dickens had lived to write about the Jazz Age, he would have produced a novel much like Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety. A sprawling and sparkling tale set in London in 1926, Atkinson’s latest is overrun with flappers, gangsters, shilling-a-dance girls, disillusioned veterans of the Great War, crooked coppers, a serial killer, absinthe cocktails, teenage runaways, snazzy roadsters and a bevy of Bright Young Things ... how else to describe the masterful way Atkinson not only musters up a city-full of characters but also slowly and smoothly binds them together through coincidence and hidden relationships? ... A reader could become as punch drunk on Atkinson’s complex, intersecting plotlines as Nellie’s customers do on her high-octane 'Turk’s Blood' cocktails, but the pleasure is worth the mental hangover. There is something ornately theatrical about this novel and the multitudinous character 'types' that populate it ... not interested in psychological depth or nuance; instead, it sets out to evoke — with gusto and precision — a lost Roaring ’20s London that, perhaps, never was. As Nellie Coker’s girls might say: If you are looking to have fun, just relax and go with it, and you will.
[A] treat ... The book is a bit like one of Meyrick’s club nights come to vibrant life. It’s part-glitz, part-sleaze, packed with intrigue and avid partygoers, all taking place in spaces where policemen, gangsters, bouncers, and dancing girls rub shoulders with ease ... Gangster-fueled plotlines aside, Atkinson’s tapestry of 1920s London glitters with time-specific tidbits ... Evocative set pieces ... [A] rollicking, glorious book.
Wonderfully balanced between the literary bravura of novels like Life After Life and the more mundane but ample pleasures of her Jackson Brodie mysteries, Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety puts a cast of irresistible characters into an intriguingly convoluted plot set in post-World War I London, wafts a Shakespearean air of antic enchantment over the proceedings, and keeps you guessing till the end — even as something tells you everything will be all right. Mostly ... The story is such a complex web of underhanded plotting and double-dealing that occasionally it's hard to tell who's out to get whom and what the game is, though this only makes it all that much more fun ... Atkinson's narrative panache is somehow historical —the brands and trams and flavors and names — and au courant, the storytelling of its time and ours, scenes unfolding only to jump back and fill in from a new perspective, characters footnoting their own thoughts. And often it's just plain funny, especially in the confines of the Coker family, who are droll in the most unsentimental way ... This is storytelling at its best — entertaining, moving, surprising — as true to the busy, Dickensian tradition as it is to the exigencies of our day.
A sulphurous drollery animates Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson’s ensemble portrait of Soho’s underworld between the wars. It continues a run of novels that put a quirkily self-conscious spin on period drama, their focus much sharper on the intricacies of character than the forces of history. But Atkinson is an expert juggler of both ... The cast of characters is lively and diffuse, though you wonder at times if the points of view are too many. The Maltese gangster and the bent copper, for example, might have been profitably pruned of their baggage. Shine all that light on motivation and you risk losing the shadows. But Atkinson loves her minor characters, and in the case of Nellie’s feckless younger son, dope addict Ramsay, she makes fine sport ... her exuberant swing between the high-and-low life of drugs and booze you may pick up traces of Patrick Hamilton, and the merest rumour of Waugh ... Atkinson has read widely on the era, and it has certainly repaid the effort in her persuasive re-creation of Soho and Covent Garden both as working neighbourhoods and nocturnal hunting grounds. Not all of the obvious bells are rung ... here is a fascinating glimpse into the fetid precincts of a Thames mortuary, Dead Man’s Hole, and unexpected sidelights on crime ... If there’s a slight disappointment in Shrines of Gaiety, it’s the slapdash ending. Having set up a grand denouement, Atkinson seems almost to tire of the plot, and hurries her characters, as it were, off stage. A chapter is devoted to What Happened Next … and we register their fates like aftertitles in a documentary. Even the ghosts end up shortchanged ... Nonetheless, this book is one to savour, for the energy, for the wit, for the tenderness of characterisation that make Atkinson enduringly popular.
... a heady brew of crime, romance and satire ... Pungent with period detail sifted from contemporary accounts, Shrines of Gaiety sees Atkinson on her finest form since the chronological shenanigans of her Costa-winning sliding-doors saga Life After Life (2013). A marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow, not to mention a throwback in an era of I-fixated autofiction, it uses more than a dozen fully inhabited characters to propel a rompy panorama that nonetheless keeps in sight the pole-axing cruelty at the book’s heart: the traffic and exploitation of girls whom 'no one would miss', as someone says, and who aren’t, as someone else puts it, 'the kind that a jury will believe' ... perkier than all those previous novels: the subject is grim, yes, but Atkinson won’t deny the potential for thrills and spills in the seamy goings-on of the interwar demimonde ... One or two larks do feel oddly barbed...A bit of fun, to be sure, but the joke feels like Atkinson punching down, since she herself pulls off exactly this feat – unless her point is that it’s silly to see Shrines of Gaiety that way, in which case she’s chiding the appreciative reader ... True, the panoptic style trades mystery for buoyancy, yet who needs suspense when Atkinson can fell a key character with nothing but a careless step into a busy road? A stirring climax redeems the novel’s more nightmarish developments by giving centre stage to a vengeful act of solidarity by the real-life, all-female gang the Forty Thieves. Wish fulfilment, maybe, yet so deeply has Atkinson drunk from the history of the period (as an afterword attests) that you’re ready to give her the benefit of the doubt; either way, you’re left grateful for the gear change, even as the longed-for justice of girl power only serves to pave the way for the rougher justice of state power at its most lethal. The wonder – as the noose tightens – is the suppleness that enables Atkinson to segue from scenes of pitch-dark horror to a brisk 'what everyone did next' coda without sugar-coating the tale’s bitter kernel: it’s a peak performance of consummate control.
If you’re a fan of historical fiction, you might take Kate Atkinson’s latest for a spin. It’s outstanding. Set in 1920s London, Shrines of Gaiety is aswarm with the playful, oh-so-familiar devices of popular storytelling, and Atkinson lays them on thick: confused identities, narrowly missed encounters, and fateful intersections of happenstance and luck ... These authorial shenanigans support a narrative voice that’s distinct from the Scottish novelist’s earlier work; it’s a stylistic departure slick with misdirection and sly reversals of expectation. These strokes enrich, rather than distract from, Atkinson’s neatly wrought storyline ... This approach makes significant demands on the book’s narrator, and Atkinson steps forward grandly here with a wondrously freewheeling approach. Her narrator regularly eases into a character’s consciousness and then gracefully out again, sometimes reporting dispassionately, sometimes hovering like an opinionated observer, and occasionally slipping in expository flashbacks ... The novel is also richly strewn with marvelous stretches of description ... a captivating, crafty Jazz Age yarn that’s not to be missed. Shrines of Gaiety is one of the year’s best.
Nellie is cunning, inscrutable, greedy and almost as slippery as Atkinson, who knows we shouldn’t like this fleshy matriarch, but makes it impossible for us not to ... a riot of inconclusion, rife with red herrings and double-crossings, characters scrambling the maze of plot lines with self-questioning at every unlikely turn ... As the riotous story concludes, the relief we feel when a lost girl arrives safely home is sincere but fleeting. We don’t mind when one character ends up in tragedy and another stuck in stasis, or even what happens to the Amethyst: these are components in a story, and fiction is a game. What stays with us is a glimpse of a newspaper delivery boy on the first page. He is not mentioned again until the very end, when he is killed during the invasion of Sicily in 1943. We are told his name is Norman, and his last words are 'Good show'.
Wry, sly, and nicely dry ... Mystery puzzlers will be enthralled with the intrigues and schemes interwoven around the colorful cast, with a resolution that neatly ties up the novel’s many strands ... No review of an Atkinson book would be complete without mentioning the author’s trademark puckishness. Considering the story’s dire happenings, she manages to insert bits of dialogue or narrative that are brilliantly funny ... Not since Martha Grimes or the earlier author Georgette Heyer has there been a writer who has successfully leavened crime with humor in such an engaging fashion ... Kate Atkinson is a writer’s writer and a reader’s absolute pleasure. Brew a pot of Pekoe or splash some tonic in a glass of gin and enjoy this captivating story told by an author at the zenith of her powers.
... a sensational novel ... as a dense, sprawling plot with several storylines swirling around the fictional Soho nightclub owner Nellie Coker, several main characters and a multitude of secondary players that will hold the reader captive ... The line distinguishing between heroes and villains is fine and blurred at times and each reader will have favorites. No single character would be nominated for sainthood but the novel grabs the imagination as well as the heart and is one I highly recommend ... Kate Atkinson grabs your attention from the first page and leaves you wanting more. Bravo!
... vibrant ... certainly not free of death, but the author’s treatment of the subject is more in keeping with her crime novels than her literary fiction. There is an enjoyable, breezy style to the omniscient narration ... The dexterous depiction of jazz-era London in Shrines of Gaiety would translate well to screen, though one imagines that the book’s prosaic, instantly forgettable title might have to change. Atkinson has a Dickensian touch when it comes to setting and character ... physical descriptions are fresh and succinct ... Save for a peppering of writerly words — uxorious, etiolated, ambrosial, cochineal, sybaritic — Atkinson’s prose is simple and clear, geared at moving the story along and managing the burden of frequent shifts in perspective ... Occasionally the writing can tend towards cliché ... This lengthy book is sustained by the colourful world building and the astute understanding of character that has won Atkinson such acclaim in the past ... The meticulous research sits easily with the fiction.
She’s up to a few similar tricks in her latest historical romp, even if it mainly delights in the ability of a story to suggest one version of events while in fact constructing another. Shrines of Gaiety (such a deliciously ambiguous title) is set in the glitteringly grubby demimonde of 1920s Soho clubland ... The pleasure lies in learning not just who is double-crossing whom but, through Atkinson’s masterful backstage string-pulling, the extent to which the story is hoodwinking us ... Atkinson has researched her period to within an inch of its life. Much of the novel’s imaginative energies are devoted to slavishly carving out the topography of a now largely vanished London, the names of streets, hotels and restaurants doggedly reiterated. Period details glint like gems in the dust ... Characters don’t so much adopt new personas as blithely flit between various versions of themselves, as though in this age of collective reinvention a coherent identity is a luxury belonging to a more innocent era ... Yet while Atkinson technically does everything right, grafting a seedy whodunnit onto an impeccably constructed social landscape (she is, after all, also a respected crime writer), this novel is oddly hard going. Individual detail is packed in so tightly it can barely breathe. Minor characters come with extremely lengthy back stories. The dialogue tends to the humdrum ... There is almost no tension. Nor is Atkinson particularly interested in character ... In short, there’s an awful lot of external detail but not much inner life. Shrines of Gaiety is in the end a fitting title for a novel that reads more like an artfully constructed memorial to a historical moment than it does a creative reimagining.
... a wondrously intricate piece of narrative clockwork ... The Jazz Age London of Shrines of Gaiety is nearly as merciless as Dickens’ Victorian metropolis and even more rife with crime and intrigue ... takes a while to gel into the brisk, sardonic, absorbing sort of novel that Atkinson fans have come to expect, in part because Nellie really isn’t the main character. Opponents may marshal against her, ranging from an allegedly Maltese gangster to bent coppers to the incorruptible Frobisher, but Nellie herself remains essentially unchanging. She serves as the hub for a collection of fascinating spokes as the novel revolves among 15 different points of view, each chapter told from the perspective of a person connected to Nellie by blood or treasure ... The novel’s shift in point of view from character to character gives the reader an aerial perspective on the novel’s interlocking storylines. It’s irresistibly pleasurable to deduce the significance of certain cryptic objects—a single silver shoe, a bluebird broach, a metal box big enough to hold a human head—and to witness passing encounters between characters who don’t yet realize how important they’ll become to each other. Coincidence probably plays more of a role in the proceedings that is strictly credible, but cities do work that way, tossing the same people together again and again in the churn of money-making and revelry (which in Atkinson’s London are the same thing). With each of the multiple turns of the wheel, the overall pattern—including that string of murders bedeviling Frobisher—comes into keener and more satisfying focus ... not quite as resonant as 2013’s Life After Life, Atkinson’s masterpiece ... But it also feels more momentous than the Jackson Brodie books, with their hero who drifts from mystery to mystery, unable to get a proper handle on his own destiny. Shrines of Gaiety does feature one brutally random act of chance reminiscent of the pivotal events that redirect the branching storylines of Life After Life. At heart, though, it’s a big, rewarding puzzle that casts a jaundiced eye at one of London’s historic heydays while slipping the reader a flask full of Jazz-Age thrills under the table.
Exuberant, cinematic, immersive, elegant and witty — with a dash of darkness — it is, as someone says of one of its characters, 'quite the little bon-bon' ... The plot follows serious threads ... The frenzy of fun all around them won’t stop. Shrines of Gaiety was a party I hated to see end.
Breathtaking new book by Scottish writer Kate Atkinson, is a sprawling kaleidoscope of a novel — both giddy and glamorous, despite being rooted in squalor and violence. It’s an impressive feat, one which Atkinson achieves with seeming effortlessness ... Shrines of Gaiety is truly a buffet of dark delights, all of it handled with Atkinson’s light, deft touch. Despite more than a dozen major characters and more interlocking storylines than one can easily delineate, the novel never falters and, crucially, the reader never loses their place. Instead, they are swept up into a heady portrait of a time, guided by one of the most remarkable writers at work today.
Along with her trademark barbed humor, surprising twists and penetrating observations on human nature, Atkinson gives her readers a sharp, glittering portrait of a mostly forgotten slice of London social history. Much of her depiction is based on the life of Kate Meyrick, who was the real Nellie Coker of Soho. Atkinson also provides satisfying codas on what happens afterward to most of her characters, which may be an old-fashioned fillip of storytelling, but it’s one that some of us can’t help but wish we got a little more often.
... busy and long, with more historical detail than is strictly necessary or easily digestible ... Naturally, all these things feature in many English novels set or written in the 1920s, but, not to compare every single author unfairly with PG Wodehouse, some writers have a heavier hand than others when it comes to mise en scène ... Nellie is amply fleshed out by the costume-drama imagination of the Costa-winner Atkinson, a popular writer handy enough with plot and character to be compared to Dickens but who does leave one feeling rather mugged off linguistically, but goodness knows not every reader will be ... Atkinson is a thoughtful writer with an astute understanding of 20th-century social history. A feminist, she never lets us forget the huge cultural changes that shattered the prewar patriarchy ... From sly, glamorous old Coker to the tragically naive little dancers fresh off the train from their home towns via clever, hearty Gwendolen, Atkinson presents a lively cast of female characters, each of whom embodies a facet of the great struggle for progress. This is the perfect novel for uncertain times, when comfort of a particularly English and nostalgic stripe is required.
Kate Atkinson works her literary magic ... Atkinson has a unique style: an arch, ironically amusing commentary upon the foibles and imperfections of human existence, skewering the motivations and experiences of her subjects, whom she treats with a generosity, humour and insight ... The narrative heft does depend upon a number of rather extraordinary coincidences. It is a very amusing book, in Atkinson’s trademark wry, understated elegance.
The book’s base ingredient is research-packed historical fiction, but there’s also a generous measure of mystery, a dash of romance, and a barely there float of playful authorial provocation. Like the sherry flip that one of its characters orders, this concoction is rich, frothy, but safely lightweight ... many of the novel’s characters fall into types, one of the risks of a book whose enthusiastic curiosity is sometimes greater than its capacity ... Atkinson is a meticulous researcher, and her fascination with the material, daily life of past eras shows in the detailed scene dressing of her novels ... the book can seem more interested in wide shots than closeups. Shrines of Gaiety, like Transcription before it, risks making the reader more invested in the world that it unfolds than in the characters it involves ... fulfills the guidelines of the genres it adopts: the missing girls are found, the historical setting richly elaborated, the romantic confusion conveniently sorted out, if not fully resolved. Yet, despite these technical satisfactions, Atkinson is never content to let her readers steep in the enjoyment of a plot tidily concluded. In this case, she hints at the idea that undergirds all of her historical fiction: no matter how closely we examine or imagine the past, the idea that we might fully understand it is always an illusion.
Kate Atkinson has the gift of creating intrigue. Her new novel, Shrines of Gaiety, will please fans of her detective fiction, and the BBC television series, Case Histories, that has been adapted from it ... This is a pleasurable well-made novel, by turns charming and jarring, but in its representation of the elusive city it depicts it owes a lot to historical research while also using a Moby-Dick-like approach to a narrative of characters searching for an elusive goal ... While the story lacks the meditative, metaphysical aspect of Melville, it is touched by a melancholy that shows Atkinson inhabits her characters and their emotions ... a bit uneven and there are times when the story of single women versus the horrors of the big city might have had more tonal variety ... Still, this is a sharp, witty, likeable book, with existential notes as well as comic ones. Atkinson’s writing is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered for the uninitiated, but any writer who can channel the philosophy of the 19th century with the colour of the 20th can hold your attention from page to page.
In one succinct chapter, Atkinson launches her genre-straddling blockbuster, which combines the colour of a historical drama with the pace of a thriller and the detail of a police procedural. In short, it is crying out to be the next big Sunday night series ... Yet, as readable and masterful as it indubitably is, Shrines of Gaiety left me slightly cold. It can’t have been the characters, who are all solidly drawn, from flighty wannabe novelist Ramsey, one of Nellie’s sons, to fickle Freda, who quickly becomes one of Frobisher’s missing girls. Nor can it have been the story, which is compelling as the body count mounts and backstories emerge ... No, what grated was the plot. Everything felt too convenient, from Gwendolen’s chance meeting with Nellie’s other son, precisely when in need of being rescued, to the ease with which she endears herself to Old Ma Coker by being – where else? – in the right place at the right time. I kept guessing what was about to happen, which meant there weren’t enough thrills for this to work as a thriller ... Not that this will stop the book’s sure-to-be-soaraway success. Atkinson, who was 43 when she published her first novel, has done enough to delight most of her existing aficionados – and even I will look forward to the inevitable TV adaptation.
Kate Atkinson has a wonderful way with words, combining laugh-out-loud wit with unexpected pathos. I gobbled up Shrines of Gaiety – which features a motley crew of characters in 1920s London, including a nightclub boss, a chief inspector intent on weeding out corruption in the police, a teenage runaway in search of fame, and a former WW1 nurse in search of said missing teenager – in just a couple of days. Recommended.
The story is packed with as many colorful characters as a Charles Dickens novel. It reads like a love letter to London during a period of resurgence and much-needed postwar decadence that enlivened its nightly hours ... Atkinson does a great job of peppering her novel with the pop culture of the times, which often made me smile ... not so much a cohesive novel as it is a snapshot of a bygone era, with enough well-written characters and subplots to engage any reader. Atkinson admits to basing Nellie Coker on the life of Kate Meyrick, the one-time queen of Soho’s clubland. She can do no wrong, whether it’s her terrific Jackson Brodie mystery series or her genre-defying stand-alone novels like this one. Any time spent with an Atkinson book is time well spent.
Breathtaking... A sprawling kaleidoscope of a novel — both giddy and glamorous, despite being rooted in squalor and violence. It’s an impressive feat, one which Atkinson achieves with seeming effortlessness.
... a delightful, if slightly sprawling book ... The downside to such a rich tapestry of characters is that I found myself distracted reading each finely detailed backstory. The level of information is almost Dickensian, or Austen-like. Yet with Austen, each cleverly remarked upon detail serves a holistic necessity that is missing from Shrines of Gaiety. Perhaps it is attempting to be too many different things. It is, however, a highly enjoyable novel and readers of Atkinson will appreciate returning to the author’s overarching themes. Atkinson, in a clear-eyed moment of self-awareness, outlines her project through aspiring novelist Ramsay Coker’s book: ‘a razor- sharp dissection of the various strata of society in the wake of the destruction of war’. And then, ‘(Ramsay was not without ambition)’. Atkinson is winking to the audience here and, I must say, I admire the gall and ambition.
Each chapter shifts focus, showing a bit of a character’s story, a glimpse of an encounter, a fragment of a person trying to exist in a complex world. We even get a fascinating look at characters who work in law enforcement ... s the fragments of the novel coalesce, readers witness interconnection, reverberations and consequences. Patience is required to see this puzzle through to its end, but the long game pays off, and there’s magic in seeing the whole unexpected picture ... There’s also pleasure in how Atkinson seamlessly integrates historical figures and moments into her story ... The history and setting add nuance to Shrines of Gaiety, but Atkinson’s characters and their choices, curiosities and corruptions keep the story unfolding, making the resolution worth every second.
... riveting ... Nellie is a thoroughly magnetic protagonist, easily capable of carrying a novel on her shoulders, but Atkinson has never shied away from big casts or intertwining plots, and she outdoes herself here ... Atkinson’s palpable fondness for her characters helps her to imbue even the most minor of them with texture and depth, and she brings the same attention to detail to her portrait of the highs and lows of Jazz Age London. Another triumph from one of our finest novelists.
While the story unfolds over a period of weeks and is almost entirely contained to London, it sprawls across social classes and gives voice to a glorious miscellany of characters ... Like all of Atkinson’s novels, her latest defies easy categorization. It’s historical fiction, but there’s a sense of knowingness that feels contemporary, and if this irony may feel anachronistic, it also feels spiritually correct. Intertwined mysteries drive the plot, but this is not a mystery in any conventional sense. The adjective Dickensian feels too clichéd to be meaningful, but Atkinson does excel at creating a big, bustling universe fully inhabited by vivid characters. And, like Dickens, Atkinson is obviously fond of her characters—even the ones who do horrible things. Sometimes this means that she lets us know the fate of a character with a walk-on part. Sometimes her care manifests in giving a character the sort of perfect ending that seldom exists outside of Greek tragedy or screwball comedy. And, in one exquisite moment, the author shows her love by releasing characters from the confines of the narrative altogether—a choice she seems to offer as a gift to both her creations and her readers ... Already one of the best writers working, Atkinson just gets better and better.
... glittering ... Atkinson’s incisive prose and byzantine narrative elegantly excavate the deceit, depravity, and destruction of Nellie’s world. She also turns this rich historical into a sophisticated cat-and-mouse tale as the various actors try to move in on Nellie’s turf. Atkinson is writing at the top of her game.
