SHRINES OF GAIETY (2022)
By Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 397 pages.
★★★★
Shrines of Gaiety is fiction, but it’s based on Kate “Ma” Meyrick, a real-life 1920s London nightclub owner. Depending on who tells the story, Meyrick was either the slightly crooked “Night Club Queen” (her nickname), or was the Queen of Racketeers. Kate Atkinson uses Meyrick as her role model for Nellie “Ma” Coker, who definitely tilts to the more serious end of the transgression spectrum.
The novel opens in 1926, when Ma has just gotten out of jail for a relatively minor offense–to the cheers of the hoi polloi and the chagrin of Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher. He suspects Ma is connected to the disappearance of numerous young women, including several who were fished from the Thames. Ma runs five nightclubs that Frobisher is certain are also brothels, and she rules the roost of a presumed felonious brood of offspring: Niven, Edith, Betty, Shirley, Ramsay, and Kitty. Each except Niven runs one of the clubs, though both Betty and Shirley went to Cambridge and leave the heavy lifting to others. Frobisher wants the Cokers permanently out of commission, but it’s not easy to nab her when untold numbers of the police are on the take.
Enter Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian in York, who is down to London on behalf of a friend with whom she served during World War One. Gwen is seeking two 14-year-old girls, Freda and Florence, who ran away from home with visions of becoming stage actresses. Shrines of Gaiety is filled with unorthodox characters. For instance, Ramsay Coker thinks he will become a famous writer; after all, he has just read Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and he knows about crime, so how hard can it be? A strange man named Azzopardi senses that a stretch in the pen has left Ma tired and weak, and he can force her to sell her clubs to him. There is Sgt. Oakes, who is dubbed the “Laughing Policeman,” but is his an expression of jollity or a nefarious cackle? Quite a few individuals are nervous about the Curse of King Tut, whose tomb Howard Carter opened in 1922, and was subsequently blamed for all manner of suspicious deaths thereafter. Perhaps not even Gwen is above suspicion. She is initially attracted to Frobisher, but he’s so awkward that she thinks maybe Niven is a better catch. So can Frobisher trust her as she promises to go “undercover” to get the goods on Ma? Ma herself is a conundrum. Has she really so shaken by her time in jail that she has soured on a life of crime, or is she as wily as a fox with a stiletto? There’s even a deranged wife, á la Jane Eyre.
There’s a bit of everything in Shrines of Gaiety–drugs, illicit homosexuality (very illegal in those days), punch-ups, Jazz Age parties, fortunetelling, a club shoot-out, a nosy boarding house matron, a pawned broach, gambling, a fire, secret lovers, an unresolved guilt trip, a possible ghost, wanton cruelty, miscalculations, financial shenanigans, assumed identities (and motives), and enough double crosses to lay down railroad tracks. Don’t be sure that you know who most wants the House of Coker to fall. Definitely don’t assume you know who knows what!
If you conclude from all of this that Shrines of Gaiety is not your paint-by-the-numbers murder mystery, you are absolutely right. In many ways it’s one giant moral dilemma for characters working out how they will satisfy ambition, desire, love, and honor. Atkinson refreshingly empowers female characters by giving them greater senses of self than their male counterparts. Frobisher is the putative investigator, but he’s nebbish and anything but intuitive. Gwen, by contrast, is a proto-feminist.
Atkinson offers a fascinating dissection of England between World War One and World War Two, a period that saw a decline in aristocratic power. In a roundabout way Ma Coker embodies a democratization of society, even if some of it veered toward vice.
There are a lot of characters–it’s not a bad idea to make yourself a cheat sheet–and the plot is labyrinthine. Shrines of Gaiety resolves, but Atkinson won’t take you there in a straight line. My only real criticism is that the novel doesn’t end so much as provide a hodgepodge afterword that’s heavy on flash-forward disclosures.
Rob Weir
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