The Bright Young Things were idiotic lotus eaters, but their inane excesses could provide a bitingly cynical chapter ... Not to mention the potential for piling up the corpses, because someone ought to murder those awful people, even if only between the pages of a book. [loc 5236]
Shrines of Gaiety opens with the release of Nellie Coker -- night-club supremo, single mother of six, epitome of the view that 'there was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn’t have to have one herself' -- from prison, where she's served six months over the trifling matter of a liquor license. Immediately surrounded by her adoring offspring, she is also keenly observed by DCI Frobisher and Miss Gwendolen Kelling. Frobisher is eager to infiltrate Ma Coker's emporia, and Miss Kelling, recently come into a fortune and in London to seek two teenage girls who've run away to seek fortunes of their own, has the makings of an excellent double agent.
There's a wealth of period detail -- Molinard’s Habanita perfume, sensational novel The Green Hat, cocktails and champagne, silver shoes and Egyptian decor, Mrs Coker's Lenormand cards and their uncannily accurate predictions -- and a strong cast, predominantly but not wholly female. (The Great War, and its generation of dead soldiers, is less than a decade in the past. Niven and Gwendolen both have war stories.) Despite the title, though, there is surprisingly little gaiety, even for would-be novelist and repressed homosexual Ramsey Coker. Instead, the relentless commerce of the city, under and over the counter, is evident in every chapter. For the Cokers, there is nothing that cannot be bought or sold. For naive runaway Freda, like so many of the lost girls of London, there's the sordid trade of unwanted touches, leering looks.
Like many of Atkinson's novels, the plot is a tangle of coincidences and connections. Gwendolen's handbag is stolen by a member of the notorious all-female Forty Thieves gang: Mrs Coker's eldest, war veteran Niven, is in a position to return it. Freda's friend Florence sends postcards home, from a stall which may be surreptitiously trading cocaine. Edith Coker seeks an abortion from the Cokers' ex-landlady, whose house Florence and Freda are living in. And so on and so forth. There are uncoincidences, too: missed opportunities, almost-encounters, glances not met. Atkinson plays with our expectations right up to the final pages. I did feel somewhat short-changed at the end of the novel. There's the jolt of an unexpected death (foreshadowed early in the novel) and a number of threads left hanging. 'And there they must remain, suspended between coming and going for ever' made me shriek with thwarted expectations. Nevertheless, I liked this a lot, though perhaps not as much as Life After Life.
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