It's 1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie's empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho's gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.
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.
