Literature

Jonathan Stones, Sherborne Literary Society

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £20) Sherborne Times reader offer price of £18 from Winstone’s Books

Just after dawn one morning in 1926, ‘a party crowd of doubtful provenance’ has gathered outside the gates of Holloway prison to greet the doyenne of their Soho demi-monde on her release from six months imprisonment. She is Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs of varying degrees of rackety jollity and mock-respectability, and matriarch to six children, who she manages with the same impersonal efficiency as she manages her business. At the end of the book we are told that the chief inspiration for the novel comes from the life and times of Kate Meyrick, a Soho hostess between the wars. (Fellow oldies of the current age may recall the equally notorious Cynthia Payne, whose various activities, both in and out of the courts, helped to keep the hacks of Private Eye gleefully employed for years.)

What follows is a cheerfully narrated and, in the main, skilfully managed romp among an extensive cast of characters including the denizens of this underworld, but carrying with it a whiff of corruption and violence. For Nellie has attracted envious enemies while she has been ‘away’, amongst them a Maltese gangster and not one but two corrupt police officers, who between them are determined to part Nellie from her highly profitable business. Ranged against them and the delinquent Coker empire is the strait-laced stalwart Detective Chief Inspector Frobisher, inaccurately dubbed ‘Frobisher of the Yard’ in the popular press, (and apparently drawn from that 1950s comic-book boys’ real-life hero ‘Fabian of the Yard’) and his unlikely sidekick, Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian and now on the lookout for two young girls who have run away from home in the North of England. The tentative love affair between Frobisher and Gwendolen is handled with Atkinson’s typical sympathy and flair, and we are skilfully made to care both about Gwendolen and one of the young runaways, Freda, as they negotiate the dangerous shoals in which they are forced to swim.

Atkinson creates a hectic swirl of characters around the various plot-lines, including the participants in a gangland shooting, a despicably venal pawnbroker, a couple of hard-as-nails landladies and a quietly omniscient chauffeur. The reader may perhaps be excused for wishing that a cast list of characters had been included, Dickens-style, at the beginning of the book. Nellie’s six children are drawn with varying degrees of opacity, but Atkinson has great fun using them as mirrors of the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the jazz age, some of whose absurdities she pins with evident glee. Occasionally the dreaded trap of the ‘historical novel’ is allowed to rear its knowing head: ‘Actually when I was in Paris I had a very interesting discussion with an American chap called Hemingway…’. The ending comes with a rush in which the many loose ends are tied up, not always convincingly, but this sortie into an antique milieu is enjoyably handled by its highly skilled narrator.

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