Kate Atkinson has great talent. Her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum was a lovely, if sometimes grim, multigenerational tale of a family in York, with a twist that is hinted at occasionally, and slowly becomes clear over the course of the book. Her Jackson Brodie novels are excellent: each character is original, distinct and memorable: like teenage Reggie, a determined, tough and charming orphan in When Will There Be Good News, or ex-policewoman Tracy Waterhouse in Started Early Took my Dog who is both normal and vivid. The books are tightly, delicately, complex.
Her more recent books have failed to evoke the same loyal affection in me, but eternally optimistic, I picked up her latest at the library.
Shrines of Gaiety is set in the 1920s in London. It opens with Ma Coker, the head of a criminal family, being released from Holloway prison. The Cokers run a collection of ‘notorious Soho nightclubs’, and on a quest to bring them down is Detective Frobisher. Meanwhile, competing gangs have their own ambitions.
It was not the moral delinquency — the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs — that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At least five he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again.
Sounds quite a bit like Peaky Blinders, does it not? Same post-WW1 time period, same sort of milieu, similar criminal family. The similarities increase over the first few chapters. There are several Coker children who help to run the family business, and there is a young woman — Miss Gwendolyn Kelling — who the Inspector has hired to infiltrate the Coker family enterprise. The most capable Coker is going to fall for Gwendolyn. All very like the Shelby family and Grace in Peaky Blinders.
As in all Atkinson’s books, there are plenty of female characters. Ma Nellie Coker has promise as a major character, but in the end, little of the novel is told from her point of view. Her history is briskly drawn at the beginning of the book, but then is touched on only briefly thereafter. The Coker kids get more attention. Niven, the oldest son, is an enigma, a sort of catch-all character:
He knew criminals, he knew dukes. He hardly drank at all, yet went to a lot of parties. He had no time for people who went to parties. He had no time for people in general and didn’t suffer fools at all.
Then come Edith, an accountant, and Betty and Shirley, who had been much admired during their time at Cambridge. (Lest this seem unlikely, this novel is based on a real-life criminal family whose daughters did indeed attend Cambridge and eventually marry peers). Betty and Shirley are largely interchangeable and given no personality. (Perhaps one of them would have been sufficient for the purposes of the novel?) Ramsay, the other son, is a hapless aspiring writer with no talent or ability, too young for the war, and sickly to boot. The last child, Kitty, has just been expelled from boarding school and wanders around the house until she is summarily sent off halfway through the book.
Kitty is not the only character who abruptly disappears. Among the many main characters are Freda and Florence, two teenagers who have run off to London to become stage dancers. Florence is an odd blank: no personality, no talent, and (spoiler alert!) she literally vanishes halfway through the book. She does eventually reappear, briefly and unsatisfactorily, at the end of the novel, but what is her purpose as a character except as a red herring?
Somewhat to my surprise, Detective Frobisher is a better fleshed-out character than is Gwendolyn Kelling. He has a mentally disturbed wife, and a quest, whereas Gwendolyn is strangely perfect: capable and cool, but also charming (all the eligible men fall for her) and relentlessly chirpy even when faced with dead girls.
The book is oddly repetitive. At multiple points we are told about Frobisher’s farm upbringing, in similar paragraphs. Then there are sections where two adjacent sentences have almost identical phrasing, where it does not seem intentional but simply overlooked:
When younger, Freda had occasionally attended Sunday School […]. When she was still quite small, Freda had played the lame boy who was left behind by the Pied Piper […]
There is telling rather than showing, and what’s more, the character’s behaviour remains inexplicable:
Nellie was fully aware that Gwendolen was betraying her at every turn and yet she felt a curious warmth towards her — a trust, almost.
There are typos, though this is not Atkinson’s fault but the publisher’s:
[…] it was difficult to image that [the book] would be to his taste.
And yet, there are paragraphs where Atkinson’s writing is characteristically vivid.
A clutch of weary dance hostesses fussed around Nellie. Close up they smelt stale, a cheap infusion of face powder, perfume and sweat, but nonetheless it was a welcome, familiar scent after the noxious air of Holloway, and Nellie let them embrace her before shooing them on their way to their beds. The Amethyst deflated with the dawn.
The book is well researched and even the more astonishing details appear to be accurate.
she had slipped into his kit bag a “Welcome Present for Friends” bought from Harrods that contained cocaine, morphine, syringes and needles.
A drug kit from Harrods?!! I had to look this up, and indeed it is a fact.
Kate Atkinson has great talent. So why is Shrines of Gaiety such a chaotic mess? There are too many characters, and too many threads. There are two evil ganglords plotting the downfall of the Cokers, but they are weirdly bland. The plot has no clear direction, and what I thought would be the grand finale is followed by a brisk offloading of one of the main characters (“so befuddled by the kiss that” the person was struck by a lorry — a rather perfunctory end, as though the author got tired of the character), and then a summary of what happened to all the other characters. And then three more chapters!
The afterword was one of the best parts of the book. Here Atkinson discusses the research that went into the book, and her authorial voice is lively and interesting.
You can see that I largely eschewed traditional history books in favour of the gossipy, chattering kind. Shrines of Gaiety is fiction, not history.
And yes, I read The Green Hat by MIchael Arlen (Heinemann, 1924) but it’s difficult from this standpoint in time to see why it caused so much fuss.
Oh well. I’ll wait for the next Atkinson.
Interesting indeed. Atkinson’s strengths are the beauty of her writing style, and her characters. Plot was never her strongest point, I thought, not even in the Brodie novels which usually would be plot driven given it is crime-fic, but not with hers, it was more style and characters even in those. So the plot falling down a bit in this latest, well, it probably was not her strength in the first place, but I wonder, did she change agents, editors, publishers, or something?
Oh, interesting. I thought her plots were very nicely done in the Brodie novels. Sure, there were some coincidences, but she did a nice job of slowly exposing the layers.
I agree, her characters are lovely. But this one just had too many of them, and many were barely described, or indistinguishable (e.g. Betty and Shirley).