Shrines of Gaiety -Atkinson
Audio performance by Jason Watkins
4 stars

This book was everything I've come to expect from Kate Atkinson; quirky characters, plenty of ironic humor, non-linear storytelling with an ambiguous, though satisfying ending.

The story is set in the roaring of the Soho nightclubs in post WW1 London. In the opening chapter, Nellie Coker, night club mavin, is being released from prison after serving some months on a liquor licensing charge. She is welcomed home, with varying levels of enthusiasm, by her six children. Nellie’s shady empire is threatened on several fronts; old enemies seeking revenge, corrupt policemen seeking fortune, and one honest policeman seeking justice. Beneath the glitter and frantic gaiety of the club scene there’s a muck of abuse and violence.

With the death of her mother, former front line nurse Gwendolyn Kelling is ready to leave her boring librarian job. When a friend’s young half sister runs away to London with another local girl, Gwen offers to go in search of Freda and Florence.

The plot meanders. Freda and Florence leave a trail that Gwen and Frobisher (the honest policeman) aren’t quite able to follow. Nellie Coker manages to stay one step ahead of her persecutors, just barely. Each of Nellie’s six children court disaster in their own individual ways. The Roaring 20’s roars on.

There’s a feminist edge to this story. It has a strong theme of righteous female retribution. Although there are some unanswered questions at the end of the book, Atkinson does provide the future history of some characters. It is clear that the gaiety will end. Debauchery and decadence has a price. The next war is coming. ( )

Nellie Coker's nightclub empire in London is very successful, but also threatened because of the police, because of her enemies plotting—at the police, Frobisher is looking into deaths of young women, Gwendolen is looking for a friend's sister, and Freda wants to dance, and they all get entangled with the Coker business. ( )

This is Kate Atkinson on quite good form. She takes us to 1920s London, to a place of hedonistic gaiety where Nellie Coker is queen of a whole series of nightclubs, each appealing to a different kind of pleasure-seeker. Her family is essential to her enterprise and the story, with two Cambridge educated daughters and a twit of a son in the mix of six. Add in a Yorkshire librarian on furlough, two young Yorkshire runaways, police officers who are variously dutiful and bent and you have a complicated and atmospheric Dickensian yarn. I enjoyed it: This is Kate Atkinson after all, but I also found it a little wearisome and forced, with not all the characters well-developed. I read through it quickly and with some enjoyment, but also feeling somewhat cheated of Kate Atkinson at her best. ( )

Nellie Coker rules supreme over the lawless underworld of swinging Soho in the 1920’s with her string of themed nightclubs and coppers in her pocket until she finds herself doing a brief spell in Holloway following an unexpected raid.

Back on the outside the foundations of her ill-gotten empire are beginning to crumble as girls start disappearing, a never-ending stream of bloated bodies are hoiked out of the Thames into Dead Man’s Hole and would-be usurpers gather.

Corruption and abduction, street stabbings and gang warfare, drug abuse and arson attacks, blackmail and some very unsavoury characters like Mrs Darling – “rarely had a woman been so badly named” – revenge-seeking Azzopardi, Maddox (bad cop) and Oakes (very bad cop) plague the Coker clan and those around them.

Yet for me the plot was secondary to the narrator’s sometimes scathing, often humorous, descriptions of the full cast of characters and the situations they find themselves. Personal favourites include The Distressed, The Knits and The Baby Party – Hooray Henrys whooping it up in nappies is always good for a laugh.

I love Kate Atkinson’s writing style, always enjoy reading her books and would definitely recommend The Shrines of Gaiety.
Next please! ( )

I was disappointed in Shrines of Gaiety. It seems as though Kate Atkinson tried to do too much. The novel is witty in its language and is cleverly referential to itself and to other books and films of the 1920s, but there were too many characters, most of which were not sufficiently fleshed out for me to care about. I plodded on to the ending, hoping that it would redeem itself there, but although most of the plot lines were tied up, it was summarily and clumsily done. One of the characters is an aspiring novelist, and the description of his planned novel, entitled "The Age of Glitter," sums up the unrealized aspirations of Shrines of Gaiety nicely: "The Age of Glitter had rapidly become unwieldy. Yes, it was a crime novel, "but it was also a razor sharp dissection of the various strata of society in the wake of the destruction of war." ( )