Shrines of Gaiety: The Sunday Times Bestseller, May 2023

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Shrines of Gaiety is a verbose, superfluous novel rooted in historical facts while being the most frustrating, boring book ever. It's not long after The Great War. Nellie Coker, the proprietress of several of London's most popular clubs, has just been released from prison after serving a few months for minor crimes. We also meet Nellie's 6 adult children, who have been running the clubs while she was out. Nellie's imprisonment seems a potential sign of worse to come and they all worry her empire is under threat. There's a Chief Inspector who sees Nellie as a moral danger and is determined to bring her down. There's a teenage girl who's left home seeking fame on the stage. And there's a country-librarian-turned-war-nurse who has come to London to look for her friend's absconded teenage sister, who finds herself agreeing to go undercover for the Chief Inspector. In this fizzy, sprawling picaresque — filigreedwith outsize characters and the improbable coincidencesof a Victorian serial — the novelist imaginesa former combat nurse looking for a missinggirl in a London that’s shaking off World War I.” and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time.

Shrines of Gaiety: A Novel: Atkinson, Kate: 9780593466322 Shrines of Gaiety: A Novel: Atkinson, Kate: 9780593466322

The delinquent Coker empire was a house of cards that Frobisher aimed to topple. The filthy, glittering underbelly of London was concentrated in its nightclubs, and particularly the Amethyst, the gaudy jewel at the heart of Soho's nightlife. It was not the moral delinquency - the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs - that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At least five he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went in through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again. A heady brew of crime, romance and satire set amid the sordid glitz of London nightlife in the 1920s...This is Atkinson on her finest form...A marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow, a peak performance of consummate control.”Crime never sleeps — it was quite easy to be killed on the streets of London either by accident or design”. The storyline is entertaining. I gave up trying to figure out where Atkinson was taking me (I should know better by now) and just went along for the ride. And what a ride! Several things about the ending surprised me, but perhaps shouldn't have. Not everything is neatly tied up at the end and Atkinson makes it quite clear that she has done this deliberately. The ending is a little anti-climactic after such a wonderful set up however this was not something that overly bothered me. We also get a final section on what happened to the characters afterwards, something I always appreciate. Whilst not containing a maternal bone in her body, Nellie will do whatever she can to ensure the survival and elevation of her 6 children. There is the war hardened sniper and his own man, Niven, the reliable book keeper Edith, the Cambridge educated if vacuous, Betty and Shirley, expected to marry into the aristocracy, the unrooted Ramsay with his pretensions of being a novelist, and the young Kitty. Upon being released from a stint in Holloway Prison, Nellie is the toast of the town, but some sense weakness, making plans to grab her business empire, willing to do anything to hasten her downfall, others pose a danger to her family, and some threats come from within. But Nellie is no pushover, she might be getting older, but she has not lost her guile and cunning. The honest DCI John Frobisher wants to ensure Ma Coker faces justice, and recruits an unlikely spy, a provincial librarian and ex-battlefield nurse, Gwendolen Kelling, with her charismatic spirit of adventure, to help him. She is in London to finally live a life, and to find the runaway girls, Freda, chasing her pipe dreams of dancing and fame, and her naive and more innocent friend, Florence. I’m so disappointed. I was excited to read about The Golden Age which was a glamorous period with fun, fabulous and even exotic characters. Shrines of Gaiety was more like Shrines of Sawdust and Depression.

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson | Waterstones Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson | Waterstones

I´ve loved all of Atkinson´s books: the Brodie series,the stand alones.She was always a delight to read:wit,clever plots, smart writing,so it saddens me to rate this one so low. Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher of Scotland Yard has been trying to bring down Nellie Coker and also to find who’s been murdering the young girls whose bodies have been washing up in the river. So when Gwendolen – Miss Kelling – approaches him about the missing girls, he enlists her help in infiltrating the clubs with a view to solving both their cases. Years ago, her husband had gambled all the family money away, so Nellie had taken her four children and joined forces with a disreputable man called Jaeger, who had been running ‘tango teas’ during the war, but by 1918, people were ready to really party. There is a large cast of characters: Nellie and her six (largely adult) children; Frobisher and his dog; Gwendolen who is, I think, the star of the story; Freda and Florence, just two of the many who run away to London seeking fame and fortune; a couple of bent policemen; Frobisher's mentally fragile wife Lottie; a man with several identities intent on regaining his ill-gotten gains; a journalist; many 'Bright Young Things' (read idiots); and a number of bodies, mostly fished out of the Thames. Even the young paperboy in the opening chapter makes a cameo appearance at the end. Each of these characters is clearly depicted and memorable in their own right. There's no chance of confusing any character with any other.

I warn you: this one takes a while to get going. Which is not such a surprise once you realize there are approximately 15 main characters. There's at least 5 plots, probably more like 8 or 10, which sounds unmanageable but it's surprisingly breezy. Reading it felt a lot like an extremely well plotted prestige tv series, where you spend the first two episodes planting a lot of seeds and learning who everyone is, then you get to just watch it go from there. A heady brew of crime, romance and satire set amid the sordid glitz of London nightlife in the 1920s . . . Shrines of Gaiety sees Atkinson on her finest form . . . A marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow . . . a peak performance of consummate control. -- Anthony Cummins * OBSERVER * Is it a hanging?” an eager newspaper delivery boy asked no one in particular. He was short, just thirteen years old, and was jumping up and down in an effort to obtain a better view of whatever it was that had created the vaudeville atmosphere. It wasn’t much past dawn and there was still hardly any light in the sky, but that had not failed to deter a party crowd of motley provenance from gathering outside the gates of Holloway prison. Half of the throng were up early, the other half seemed not to have been to bed yet.