Heligoland, by Shena Mackay

Stevie Davies enjoys the whimsical wonders and quirky comedy of one of our most eccentric novelists

Heligoland, Finisterre ... in that epoch when the radio was a wireless-set, when small girls sat toasting bread on forks at open fires ... Dogger, Fisher, Bight ... in safe, dull Fifties domestic interiors ... Malin, Shannon ... radio waves lapped them with shipping forecasts proposing gales in faraway places. But to Rowena Snow, the heroine of Shena Mackay's Heligoland, comes a double orphaning which bereaves her of sanctuary and exposes her to blizzard conditions.

The terra incognita of Heligoland is her imagined refuge through life – a life not led. Of mixed Scots and Indian birth, Rowena suffers the 20th-century tragedy of multiple displacement, her Himalayan origins shrouded beneath the snowdrift of her "first" memory of the Great Winter of 1946-7. Exilic homelessness is the heart of Heligoland. The novel's mode is tragicomic, recuperative, sometimes poignant, at others whimsical, studded with lyric fantasias drawing on a palette of gemlike colours. A dialectic between black and white, fire and ice, is enacted in the sublime opening snow-scene: toddler Rowena's skin dark against her ice-white world.

Each of us has a Heligoland. Not everyone is blessed by a Nautilus. The imaginative conceit which centres the novel represents a relic of modernist idealism: a spiral-shell folly in south London built as an avant-garde artists' colony. Rowena is now 50. The Millennium is nigh and only a few jaded, dotty codgers remain in the decrepit Nautilus.

Mackay ruefully mocks the failed social experiments of the 20th century as narcissistic fantasies. Rowena herself is the survivor of a so-called "progressive school", founded on principles of barbarous barminess. Heligoland's preoccupation with fabricated alternative communities has something of Iris Murdoch and of A S Byatt. But the novel also celebrates dodo ideologies, poising itself on the moment before decrepitude passes into desuetude. To the decaying Nautilus, Rowena comes as cleaner and cook, working a banal magic with her duster and homely arts, to give the community a swansong and to retrieve something of herself.

Heligoland is shaped as a myth of renewal. On the narrative level, it doesn't really work: the reader's patience is strained by irritating comedic chat between quirkily named eccentrics (Lyris Crane, Jenners Leaf, Lord Killdeer). There is intemperate declamation of doggerel: as Rowena cooks, she thinks to herself, "Smarty Arty had a party. No one came." If each novel unconsciously condemns itself in commending its themes, Heligoland may be said to do so here. It is all a bit arty and confected. In suspending her fiction between realism and whimsical fable, Mackay pins her hopes on art as panacea for problems the last century disastrously failed to solve. But the statue does not move.

Heligoland's twin strengths lie in its sensitive treatment of Rowena and in the lyricism that lifts the creaky plot to something bizarrely beautiful, a technique which displays its own artificiality, like literary enamelling. At the moments where art and nature meet, Mackay is at her most writerly. Emblematic imagery is often luminous: Gus is "as papery as a disc of honesty". The emphasis on origins is encapsulated in the image of an egg.

When Rowena is pelted by youths, she feels in the first concussive shock as if her own skull had broken and "stared, at bright yellow blood and jellied brain fluid on her palm". Gus produces an egg from his coat which is not "a jewelled Fabergé egg" (conjuring Fabergé into the novel), not a phoenix, snake, tortoise, cockatrice ... but possibly an ostrich's, blown and containing a shrivelled embryo. The Nautilus, a shell containing abortive human relics, is another such addled but extraordinary wonder.

Stevie Davies's latest novel is 'The Element of Water' (The Women's Press)