A new Kate Atkinson book is always an occasion for glee and a little trepidation, like a night out planned by a fun friend you don’t entirely trust. Atkinson operates in two distinct modes, both of which can be intoxicating. Half the time, she makes masterly use of familiar forms, as in her detective novels or her more recent foray into the spy thriller, displaying her trademark wit while hewing to the rules of genre. The rest of her books are less easily categorized, and are linked mainly by their pointed interest in disturbing the expectations we might bring to a narrative. These are deceptively light and playful works, and they leave the reader with a surprising emotional hangover upon turning the last page.
No doubt some Atkinson readers like both of these modes equally. I have a strong preference for her metafictional books, precisely because of their disorienting effect. It takes a rare and particular deftness to unravel a reader’s feeling of safety while sustaining an approachable, compulsively readable narrative, as Atkinson does in her 1995 début, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum.” That book, which chronicled four generations of an English family through flashbacks, prolonged footnotes, and jarringly timed revelations, infamously beat out Salman Rushdie’s “The Moor’s Last Sigh” for the Whitbread Prize. In British media, Atkinson was derisively described as “a 44-year-old chambermaid” who “had written a Post-Modern novel, but might not know it.” But, as Hilary Mantel wrote in her furiously vindicating review, Atkinson (who nearly completed a Ph.D. in postmodern American fiction) knew exactly what she was doing with the book’s digressive temporal leaps. Like Rushdie, Atkinson had an inventiveness, Mantel wrote, that “makes most English fiction look chlorotic, green-sick, an exhausted swooner fanning herself in the twilight of a tradition.”
Atkinson’s provocations are most visible in 2013’s “Life After Life,” in which a single character is fated to live her life over and over again. The premise allows for infinite chances at narrative resolution—the novel’s narrator, Ursula, gradually works toward a scenario in which she might save her younger brother, Teddy, from a violent death— but it soon becomes clear that, for Atkinson, the idea of recuperation via storytelling is a false promise. As the author told the New York Times, in 2013, “He’s still a victim of history. . . . The next time Ursula’s born, Teddy might die. Anything might happen.” This sense of contingency inheres in most of Atkinson’s work: an apparently happy ending is not necessarily happy, and not necessarily an ending at all.
The other side of Atkinson’s œuvre is more strictly rooted in pleasure. Many readers know her best as the writer of the acclaimed Jackson Brodie mysteries, adapted for television as “Case Histories.” The Brodie books demonstrate her great facility with genre, pairing pulse-quickening suspense with Atkinson’s distinctive blend of puckishness and acerbity. Her recent exercise in Cold War-era spy fiction, “Transcription” (2018), while lacking in depth of character, challenges the tropes of a tired genre with its foregrounding of women’s labor, its structural inventiveness, and its insatiable hunger for fascinating historical apocrypha. These are novels that delight, and even disturb, without leaving you feeling utterly ruined.
Despite the many intoxicants that suffuse its pages, including booze, cocaine, morphine, and the wild disillusionment of post-First World War London, Atkinson’s new novel, “Shrines of Gaiety,” falls decidedly on the non-ruination side of things. The book’s base ingredient is research-packed historical fiction, but there’s also a generous measure of mystery, a dash of romance, and a barely there float of playful authorial provocation. Like the sherry flip that one of its characters orders, this concoction is rich, frothy, but safely lightweight.
The novel draws inspiration from the larger-than-life figure of Kate Meyrick, the “night-club queen” of nineteen-twenties London, who owned a series of clubs routinely populated by celebrities, royals, and the so-called Bright Young Things of the period. Her stand-in here is Nellie Coker, who, like Meyrick, runs a night-life empire in Soho’s “square mile of vice,” assisted by her brood of grown children. The novel’s loosely woven plot revolves around the efforts of a corrupt cop and a vengeful underworld rival to end Nellie’s reign. Many of the trappings of this world—elaborately beaded evening gowns, fancifully named drinks, depravity dressed up as childish whimsy, adults with names like Bunny or Pingo—are familiar from the work of high-society writers of the period, such as Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Nancy Mitford. But despite Nellie’s fixation on the moneyed echelon of society, “Shrines of Gaiety” is more concerned with what lies just under its surface: the shadowy world of organized crime, abuse, and corruption that keep the dance floors open and the marked-up champagne flowing.
The novel’s multiple perspectives bounce between the haves and the have-nots of Soho’s densely entangled world. At the top of the hierarchy is Nellie, whose power and influence have been both earned and stolen. At the bottom is the terrifically named Alfreda Murgatroyd (Freda to her friends), an enterprising fourteen-year-old who ran away from York with her unambitious best friend, Florence, in tow. Freda came to London to make her name on the stage, but ends up working as a dance hostess in one of Nellie’s clubs. She comes to know the Cokers, whose luxurious family home in Hanover Square is “a world away from the seediness of the Soho that paid for it.” Freda and Florence, on the other hand, are just two of the countless girls at risk of disappearing into the city’s dark recesses, sometimes to resurface dead in the Thames. Atkinson’s London runs on the intertwining economies trading in young women: sex work, the theatre, the clubs, domestic labor, and, for the socially ambitious Nellie’s daughters, the marriage market. These worlds render girls interchangeable to the callous people who benefit from them. As Gertie, one of the unrooted young women who drifts in and out of the novel’s gaze, comments breezily, “You can’t keep track of girls in London. They pop up one minute and—poof!—they’re gone the next.”
Conveniently connecting these two plotlines is Gwendolen Kelling, a former battlefield nurse and discontented librarian dispatched from York by family friends to find and return Freda and Florence. Through a series of propulsive, if unlikely, events, Gwendolen ends up a somewhat bemused double agent, working for both Nellie and Inspector John Frobisher, a rule-abiding detective working to bring down the queen’s night-life empire. Although we flit between various characters, Gwendolen is the closest thing we have to a protagonist. Still holding tight to her memories of the war (“she was possessive of it, it had changed everything” ), her lust for life, reignited by this new adventure, draws her deeper into the mysteries of clubland, as well as an unexpected love triangle. She’s a heroine familiar from Atkinson’s other period pieces: intelligent, dissatisfied, desperately seeking a fresh way to live in the wake of major personal and historical change. Indeed, many of the novel’s characters fall into types, one of the risks of a book whose enthusiastic curiosity is sometimes greater than its capacity.
That curiosity is itself familiar. Atkinson is a meticulous researcher, and her fascination with the material, daily life of past eras shows in the detailed scene dressing of her novels, which often feature product placements for real brands or items. (In “Shrines of Gaiety,” we learn that Harrods sold a package called the Welcome Present for Friends that contained “cocaine, morphine, syringes, and needles.”) She offers hints of a period’s popular obsessions—the curse of Tutankhamun, in this case—that tantalize without feeling expository. And some details serve as rabbit holes, inviting readers to conjure further context for the period at hand. Throughout the book, Atkinson references Charles Penrose’s 1922 music-hall hit “the Laughing Policeman,” a deranged and appropriately sinister soundtrack to the plot. The history of the song, a transatlantic appropriation of the Black singer George W. Johnson’s “Laughing Song,” is a sobering reminder that Atkinson’s England exists in a global cultural context.
Yet the specificity of national identity is paramount to Atkinson’s work. She often finds herself in an England haunted by war, whether those of the past or the ones to come. There is no mistaking this place, with its fractious blend of nostalgia and irony, elegy and unsentimentality, for anywhere else. (One is reminded of the protagonist in “Transcription,” who simply murmurs with her dying breath, “This England.”) At times, “Shrines of Gaiety” teases a different, more diverse England than Atkinson has shown us before, whether in brief references to the Chinese drug dealer Brilliant Chang (a historical figure who also appears in “Peaky Blinders”), or in passing descriptions of Nellie’s clubs, in which “members of the public and gang roughs rubbed shoulders with royalty, both those in exile and those still in possession of their thrones, Americans rich beyond measure, Indian and African princes. . . . There was nowhere else in England, possibly in the world, where so many different estates could be found together at one time.” These moments also point to the novel’s limits; they offer a rich, cinematically broad image, but the book can seem more interested in wide shots than closeups. “Shrines of Gaiety,” like “Transcription” before it, risks making the reader more invested in the world that it unfolds than in the characters it involves.
This brings us back to matters of genre and titration. Atkinson, as noted, is a skilled maker of mystery, suspense, and historical fictions. But what raises an Atkinson novel from merely enjoyable to devastating is her insistent challenging of the recuperative, conciliatory uses of fiction, whether through a novel’s structure or through singular, shocking acts of narrative violence. At the end of “A God in Ruins” (2015), a “companion” to “Life After Life,” Atkinson abruptly undoes the life of a character we’ve grown to care for, stripping away the illusion that a fictional happy ending can ameliorate the losses of history. This reminder is cruel but generative, lending a dark sophistication to Atkinson’s absorbing prose.
Such precise metafictional alchemy is never fully enacted in “Shrines of Gaiety.” The closest that we get is the running metaphor of clubland as fairyland—either the dangerous home of the fair folk in British mythology or the tamed version of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Freda and Florence, newly arrived in the city, are stunned to find themselves in a kind of alternate dimension; as Florence warns, “You must never eat or drink in fairyland. . . . Always be polite and remember nothing is what it seems to be. They’ll serve you wine in crystal cups and peaches on golden plates, but really the wine is pond scum and the peaches are snails. And all the gold and jewels are just rocks and ashes.” The connection is obvious—one of Nellie’s clubs is called the Crystal Cup, and readers have seen her daughter Betty peel a peach with a little knife. The book’s final chapter alludes to the traditional ballad “Thomas the Rhymer,” about a perilous voyage into fairyland.
But it’s the organized chaos of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that comes to govern the metaphor. The play, which flits in and out of the novel, mirrors the stagy theatricality of Nellie’s world, where every person plays several roles in the schemes being hatched, and where glamorous illusions have their hard, often violent limitations. It also reminds readers of the artifice of the novel as a form, in which a godlike exterior hand directs the lives of the hapless mechanicals within. (As Gwendolen notes, “the gods were ruthlessly indifferent to humanity,” a central motif in Atkinson’s work.) “Shrines of Gaiety” could be called an exercise in staginess; Atkinson threads a flagrant number of coincidences, near-misses, and winking foreshadowings (more than one character unwittingly predicts the manner of his own death) into the text. At the novel’s end, she doles out the future fates of her characters, with one gleeful exception; this brief nod to her metanarrative concerns gives the book a piquant finish. “Shrines of Gaiety” fulfills the guidelines of the genres it adopts: the missing girls are found, the historical setting richly elaborated, the romantic confusion conveniently sorted out, if not fully resolved. Yet, despite these technical satisfactions, Atkinson is never content to let her readers steep in the enjoyment of a plot tidily concluded. In this case, she hints at the idea that undergirds all of her historical fiction: no matter how closely we examine or imagine the past, the idea that we might fully understand it is always an illusion. ♦