Kate Atkinson’s new novel is a heady brew of crime, romance and satire set amid the sordid glitz of London nightlife in the 1920s. It begins when the notorious club owner Nellie Coker has just ended a six-month jail term for a licensing breach at one of her legendary Soho venues – an embarrassing episode that leaves her asking if she’s really getting value for money from the backhanders she’s giving police. Worse still, there’s a new broom in town: upstanding DCI Frobisher, keener than his colleagues to investigate a flood of missing girls, among them 14-year-old runaway Freda, whose dreams of West End stardom run aground on the night-time economy’s thirst for flesh.
Pungent with period detail sifted from contemporary accounts – the cocktails, the drugs, the clothes – Shrines of Gaiety sees Atkinson on her finest form since the chronological shenanigans of her Costa-winning sliding-doors saga Life After Life (2013). A marvel of plate-spinning narrative knowhow, not to mention a throwback in an era of I-fixated autofiction, it uses more than a dozen fully inhabited characters to propel a rompy panorama that nonetheless keeps in sight the pole-axing cruelty at the book’s heart: the traffic and exploitation of girls whom “no one would miss”, as someone says, and who aren’t, as someone else puts it, “the kind that a jury will believe”.
Atkinson’s regular readers will recognise her reworking past preoccupations: a conspiracy to hush up child abuse was also a plot point of Big Sky, the 2019 outing for her regular protagonist Jackson Brodie. When Frobisher asks a young librarian named Gwendolen to infiltrate Nellie’s empire, it echoes the spy thriller Transcription (2018), whose typist heroine is likewise drawn into a hazardous undercover mission. And when he moots the looming “death of western civilisation”, relieved in a key moment to find himself far from metropolitan “filth and ordure”, it usefully confines to a single point of view the slightly crotchety strain of thought that had freer rein in 2015’s A God in Ruins, which juxtaposed wartime sacrifice with the state of 21st-century Britain.
