Kate Atkinson’s new book ‘Shrines of Gaiety’ is ‘truly a buffet of dark delights’

“Shrines of Gaiety,” the breathtaking new book by Scottish writer Kate Atkinson, is a sprawling kaleidoscope of a novel — both giddy and glamorous, despite being rooted in squalor and violence. It’s an impressive feat, one which Atkinson achieves with seeming effortlessness.

Set in 1926, in a London awakening from the aftermath of the Great War (while still scarred from the experience), the novel revolves around Nellie Croker. This grand dame of Soho nightlife runs an empire of nightclubs and bars with the assistance, to varying degrees, of her six children. Croker, whom Atkinson based on Kate Meyrick, “the queen of Soho’s clubland” (previously fictionalized as Ma Mayfield in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”), seems from the outside to be a force of nature; the revelation of her depths is only part of the considerable appeal of “Shrines of Gaiety.”

The novel is set in motion by two events. The first is the release of Croker from prison and her return to Soho. (The eager presence of a 13-year-old newspaper delivery boy, asking, “Is it a hanging?” as the novel’s opening line, feels plucked out of a novel by Charles Dickens; in a single image Atkinson establishes the book’s tone and approach.)

The second inciting event is the arrival in London of Gwendolen Kelling, who served as a nurse during the war and had settled reluctantly into the role of spinster librarian in York (despite only being in her 20s). She has come to the city in search of two missing girls. She partners with Chief Inspector John Frobisher, who has been deployed to Bow Street station to get a handle on the corruption there, much of it leading back to Croker. Atkinson readers will likely feel a frisson of recognition as they get to know Frobisher; the chief inspector shares his world-weary intelligence with Jackson Brodie, the contemporary ex-cop turned private detective protagonist of five previous Atkinson novels.

The novel spirals outward, to incorporate a growing number of missing and murdered girls, and young women found floating in the Thames (Dead Man’s Hole, “the morgue beneath Tower Bridge … where the bodies were grappled out and temporarily stored” is a setting that will haunt your dreams), as well as the creeping encroachment on Croker’s empire from rival gangs and corrupt police alike. Factoring in the family dynamics of the Crokers, and Frobisher’s relationship with his war-shattered French (or perhaps Belgian?) wife, the novel gains force rather than dissipating, becoming a whirlpool that sweeps up the dreams of young girls coming to the metropolis to become stars, amidst parties and champagne and glamorous hotel suites, alongside attempted murders, botched abortions and attempted abductions.

“Shrines of Gaiety” is truly a buffet of dark delights, all of it handled with Atkinson’s light, deft touch. Despite more than a dozen major characters and more interlocking storylines than one can easily delineate, the novel never falters and, crucially, the reader never loses their place. Instead, they are swept up into a heady portrait of a time, guided by one of the most remarkable writers at work today.

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