Book Review - Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
Published by: Doubleday
Publication Date: September 27th, 2022
Format: Hardcover, 416 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy
Ma Coker is being released from prison. Detective Inspector John Frobisher sits in his car watching the spectacle of her release. Her children crowd around her for the camera. The notorious Queen of Clubs got locked up for a minor infraction, but Frobisher knows that she is rotten and he will make it his life's work to see her back behind bars for good. His job is to root out corruption and catch the bad guys, even if they're coppers. Because to have avoided prison for so long Ma Coker has to have someone on the inside and Frobisher is seconded to the Bow Street police station to find out just who that is. Which is how he met Gwendolyn Kelling. Miss Kelling is a mild mannered librarian from York. After the death of her mother she has surprisingly come into quite a bit of money. Two girls from York have gone missing; Freda Murgatroyd and Florence Ingram. Miss Kelling is friends with Freda's half-sister Cissy and Gwendolyn agrees to go to London to look for them. Freda is a silly girl with dreams of being an actress and she obviously just dragged Florence along for company. But these kind of girls can get chewed up and spit out by London and they often end up working in Ma Coker's clubs. So when Miss Kelling shows up at the police station asking for help Frobisher is entranced by the young woman. She's so forthright, so put together, unlike his wife, that he will think up any reason to see more of her. Therefore he says he'll get his men looking into the girls disappearance, but that she might want to check out the clubs, and if she's going to go there she could help him. Miss Kelling is up for the challenge. She walks into the Amethyst, the crown jewel of Ma Coker's clubs, on the arm of an undercover cop, and ends up helping out a gang member who's been shot. This brings Miss Kelling to the attention of Ma Coker. She could use someone like Gwendolyn. Someone able to stand her ground and have a cool head in a crisis. Therefore she asks the librarian from York if she wouldn't mind running a night club. It even comes with it's own apartment. Miss Kelling jumps at the opportunity. She claims for DI Frobisher it's so she can help him from the inside, but maybe, just maybe, it's because she's drawn to Ma's oldest son, Niven. There's something about him that is intriguing. With all the clubs and all the people and the seething vast metropolis, anything is possible, but one thing is certain, at this moment in time London revolves around Ma Coker. But with an enemy list as long as hers how long will this last?
Over the past few years historical fiction set during the roaring twenties has undergone a seismic shift. Books about the "bright young things" are no longer the rage, instead the focus has shifted to those of a lower economic class. The shift started by first embracing an Upstairs, Downstairs vibe, the we're all in this together and together we can get through this. But the world has changed, a pandemic, poverty, and political upheaval has worn us all down. The best example to hand is Downton Abbey. When the first movie arrived on screens in 2019 I adored it, the cast of characters pulling together for King and Country. When Downton Abbey: A New Era arrived in 2022 with the characters flaunting their wealth and vacationing on the Riviera, I couldn't help thinking, perhaps Julian Fellowes should have read the room. This wasn't the escape I was personally looking for after two years of hell. In fact it made me hate all the Crawley family for their excesses. How dare they behave this way? And I wasn't the only one who felt this way, the fact the film made $100 million less kind of speaks for itself. Which is why readers are right pointing out that this is the book that speaks to us now, there's pain and suffering after the end of the first world war and we're focusing on the lower classes who are fleecing the parasitic bright young things. Criminals are the new heroes, I mean just look how many books have been written about Alice Diamond in the past few years and you can see the trend that Julian Fellowes was blind to. And Kate Atkinson has a way with creating memorable characters. This book might be said to have a somewhat bloated cast, one of my friends thinks there were twenty-six "main" characters, but when I started to add it up I think it was higher. Because there is no such thing as a minor character in this book. Everyone gets a backstory, everyone has their lives lovingly told in beautiful language right up until the moment Kate Atkinson got bored with them all. That is the only way I can explain how this book ended. She wrote these complex, if very self-centered characters and then just stopped. Did she hit her allotted word count? Because she kills off DI Frobisher in a death that is almost stupider than Dan Stevens's on Downton Abbey and it opened up of the floodgates; jumping all the over twentieth century clinically listing when and how the characters died, but stoutly refusing to solve Florence's disappearance or Vivian Quinn's murder. Though what made me furious with this book, beyond all the unresolved plotlines, is that Gwendolyn and Niven's future and romantic fate is "suspended between coming and going forever." That is where she left the main narrative? Now that is a hanging offense.
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