[In the following review, Bradshaw lauds as gorgeous the prose of Heligoland.]

Shena Mackay's elegant, elusive new book [Heligoland] sketches out the circumstances of marginal and defeated lives in what are almost short stories, loosely threaded like beads on a string. Her theme is elderly or middle-aged people living fretfully in genteel obscurity, but doing so in such a way that they seem like bright, observant but powerless children. This is drawn so playfully and so compassionately—and with such consistently beautiful writing—that the experience is mysteriously comic and sweet.

The venue is the Nautilus, an eccentric house designed in the 1930s which resembles a seashell and whose rooms look like a shell's chambers. Set amid heavy gravel in which an anchor and chain have been whimsically placed, it seems as if the house should be on a seashore, but it is in fact in the London suburbs. This was established as the location of a Bloomsbury-ish bohemian community of yore, with lavish bar, magnificent library and a printing press long since fallen into disuse.

It now houses just two of its elderly pioneers. Francis Campion is a querulous minor poet, worrying away at slights and glancing condescensions in various biographies and literary histories; Celeste Zylberstein is of Jewish and central European extraction, the widow of Arkady, another man of letters. New tenant Gus Crabb, an antiques dealer of faintly roguish mien who has moved into the Nautilus having just been left by his wife and children, is quite without these literary credentials. And the heroine is Rowena Snow, who applies for the post of housekeeper at the Nautilus: an Asian woman brought up as an orphan in an ecstatically remembered arcadia of remote Scotland, then unhappily sent south to an experimental boarding school called Chestnuts before drifting into ill-paid work in the caring professions.

This is a world of people who listen to Radio 4 last thing at night: who drift off to sleep to “Sailing By” and then, as often as not, get jerked sharply awake by “Lillibulero” at two in the morning as the station makes way for the World Service. The Heligoland of the title is an island off the German coast that used to be mentioned in the incantation of the shipping forecast but is now omitted, and which Rowena's childish self—a self that bleeds into her adult persona—fantasises as a promised land of happiness.

That Radio 4 trope is part of the book's intense and exotic Englishness, and its delicate, pre-modern feel. This is a book in which drum and bass can be heard thudding from young people's cars, but these novelties do not impinge greatly on a world in which people unselfconsciously refer to “the wireless”. Celeste's Jewish mannerisms and Yiddish phrases are effortlessly subsumed into the Anglo-Saxon mix, and it is difficult to remember that Rowena is of a different ethnic group from everyone else. Apart from one possibly racially motivated incident, in which a crowd of yobs throw an egg at her from a car, it does not register as a very important factor. Like the black African character in The Archers whose colour was never remarked upon, Rowena does not seem alienated from the rest of the cast, or at least no more than they all are from each other.

The driving force at the centre of this book is not really the narrative, because the impetus that that provides is pretty low: nothing very much happens, and the story is always turning left, right and backwards into diverting sidestreets and culs-de-sac. (Bafflingly, one very important event, the husband of an old friend falling in love with Rowena, gets only a brief mention.) It is Mackay's gorgeous prose that does the work, along with the seductive, sad and hilarious vignettes that she conjures up, sequences and setpieces that are often themselves in a subordinate position to the flashbacks appended to the main narrative.

The writing is superb, and of that unassuming, un-worked-up kind that comes only from an author whose gentle mastery of language is quite beyond showy displays of technique. There are too many felicities to cite here, but the description of the snowy scene at the book's beginning is wonderfully achieved, while there are laugh-out-loud descriptions of Mrs Diggins, the cantankerous cook at Rowena's old school, who has a face like a “cruel spoon”, and a preposterous boho couple who hope to persuade Francis to get their execrable dramatic monologues performed on the radio.

Heligoland can be a bemusing book in some ways: we see glimpses of lives, fragments and shards, rather than amply delineated, rounded existences. But the peripheral nature of all this is precisely the point: these are vulnerable people in the evening of lives of which they have no clear view, living in a muddle, and muddling through. It is this partial victory on which Mackay bestows her gentle, lenient and generous imagination.