A sulphurous drollery animates Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson’s ensemble portrait of Soho’s underworld between the wars. It continues a run of novels – Life After Life, A God in Ruins, Transcription – that put a quirkily self-conscious spin on period drama, their focus much sharper on the intricacies of character than the forces of history. But Atkinson is an expert juggler of both.
The year is 1926. Nellie Coker, matriarch and nightclub proprietor, has just been released from a six-month stretch in Holloway. Educated in Paris, widowed in Edinburgh, Nellie flourished in London after an ill-gotten windfall from a deceased landlady who happened to be a gangland fence. She manages her six children with the same impersonal efficiency as she runs the business, the Amethyst being the “gaudy jewel” in her string of clubs – others include the Crystal Cup, the Sphinx and the Pixie. While in prison her domain has been under threat from rivals. She’s also haunted by the drowned, dripping ghost of a former employee, Maud, yet another of the young women lately fished from the Thames – but did they kill themselves or are they murder victims?
