‘Shrines of Gaiety’ by Kate Atkinson

This was an enjoyable read. It is a novel that is set in London in 1926 at around the time of the General Strike, but which has no pretensions whatever to pronounce in a serious way on the state of the nation a century ago. This was the era we tend to think of as being that of ‘the Bright Young Things’, happily rebelling against the Victorian morality of their parents' generation and the value system that brought about the disastrous World War of 1914–18. ‘Shrines of Gaiety’ though is not about them, but much more about those who looked to make money one way or another by catering to their whims.

At its centre is Nellie Coker, owner of several outré nightclubs, who is clearly based on Kate Meyrick (1875–1933), who ran five clubs in the West End during the 1920s and who, like Nellie, made a great deal of money while also serving not infrequent prison sentences for licensing offences.

This novel starts strongly with a crowd assembling outside Holloway Prison early one morning, press photographers in tow, to witness Nellie's release after serving a short sentence. It goes on to weave together various narratives concerning her six children, two police officers who are in her pocket and a gangster or two. We also have an upright police officer in an unhappy marriage, an attractive librarian who has inherited a fortune and goes undercover to spy on Nellie's empire, and two young dancing girls from York who have run away to London in search of fame and fortune.

There is thus a plethora of characters and no one main protagonist, and this makes the book distinct. It is also though somewhat problematic from the reader's perspective because while the book is most certainly a lively, entertaining read, it lacks a central predominant figure through whose eyes we see things and with whom we can identify, sympathise and root for. It is a hoot, but lacks heart.

I recently went to an author event at which Kate Atkinson was interviewed and I was struck by her modesty and total lack of pomposity. At one stage, talking about another of her novels, she joked about how halfway into the writing it dawned on her that she was in trouble because she ‘had no plot’. She was joking, but I think that this is perhaps a weakness of this novel in a way. There are several plots that kind of come together at the end, but not hugely convincingly. Instead each of the major characters has his or her own little story, some of which conclude and some of which don't. She ends the story rather abruptly in the end with a series of paragraphs stating what happened to each of them in the years after 1926. Nicely-contrived, but not hugely satisfying for me at any rate.

So the characters are vividly sketched rather than deeply developed, and the plotting is sometimes unconvincing. Why, then, is this novel worth reading? The answer is the setting. Kate Atkinson has here recreated a world – a particular spirit and set of values – that was associated with a particular area of central London at a particular time. Evelyn Waugh made this world his subject too in ‘Vile Bodies’, ‘A Handful of Dust’ and, in some memorable episodes, in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ too. But the clubs and dancers, and the police officers who used to raid them were incidental to his stories, not their focus. Here they take centre stage.

Kate Atkinson is brilliant at writing memorable set pieces too, often, it has to be said, involving brutal violence and violent deaths. Her sense of humour is both exuberant and black. There is little room for sentimentality in her fictional world, and the prevailing outlook is often decidedly cynical. This gives her novels a definite character.

She has some serious things to say here about the way society treated women in the 1920s. There is an interesting contrast between formidable, independent women such as Nellie and Gwendolen, who are very much in control of their lives, and the vulnerable young women who arrive in London with dreams of stardom only to find themselves exploited, abused and worse. Female emancipation and female exploitation are thus presented as two sides of the same coin. Atkinson also has something to say about the sheer triviality of so much social life that was about to be knocked right back into seriousness with the crash of 1929, the rise of fascism and another ghastly world war.

I enjoyed reading this, but never became particularly emotionally involved in it. It is not a book I am likely to recommend widely. Yet it is dazzlingly written, with chutzpah and confidence, and I suspect it will linger in my imagination for a long time.