[In the following review, Hensher assesses Mackay's literary accomplishment and asserts that Heligoland “has a deceptive simplicity which conceals great art, and it manages to convey a big emotional journey in a relatively brief span.”]

Shena Mackay has had a difficult and unconventional career, and it has taken a long time for most readers to register what a powerful and original novelist she is. Several things have counted, unfairly, against her: her subjects are not just domestic, but often suburban, which she presents with a disconcerting rapture. She does not write long books, nor polemical ones; it is hard to say what any given novel by her is ‘about’, although various fiercely held convictions may, from time to time, be discerned. They are primarily about human beings living their lives, rendered with increasing mastery and a hard-won truth; and there is nothing harder in the world to defend than that. In her prime, she reminds me sometimes of a very different novelist, Elizabeth Taylor; both have a rare gift of making their characters interesting whether their acts and situations are objectively so or not. She can make you watch a girl walking up a country road with nothing much at the end of it; and that takes some skill.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty for the conventionally minded critic is that her career has followed an unusual path. She was a child prodigy among novelists, and her very early novels, written in her teens, such as Music Upstairs and Toddler on the Run—my favourite of all her titles—are flip, brilliant miniatures out of the school of Brigid Brophy. They are wonderfully funny and effortless, but tiny and short-breathed; and then she fell suddenly silent. When she started to publish again, some years later, her style had broadened and deepened, and become much less easy to classify. The glorious, glamorous Redhill Rococo and A Bowl of Cherries were like nothing else being written at the time; their mood must have been hard to catch, and they were often either misread as satires or dismissed by metropolitan readers as naive books about suburban people.

She has been patient, and taught us how to read her books, and slowly we have caught up with her. What were always beautiful books have become steadily more expert, and now she is generally acknowledged as a unique voice of exceptional confidence and range. She has always been greatly loved by her readership; with the increasing accomplishment of her recent novels, The Orchard on Fire, The Artist's Widow and, especially, Heligoland, there can be no excuse for not taking her seriously.

Her books give the impression of great generosity. Certainly, she is a writer who finds ecstatic delight in mundane things, and there are loving descriptions of bright plastic hair-clips, cheap sweets and gaudy, suburban flower-beds. There is no irony in any of this; she is capable of loving them as Iris Murdoch could love a rock. She believes fervently that the world is full of beauty, and the aesthetic pleasures of the uneducated taste are as profoundly experienced as those of the learned. Indeed, her novels, and, particularly, many of her short stories come from a belief that the life of, say, a girl growing up in the suburbs is richer in wonder and beauty than the lives of sophisticated aesthetes. A simple person will respond ecstatically to ordinary objects, to birds, flowers, angel fish in a pet shop, even a neon sign; a sophisticated one will save his delight for museums, and his life has less beauty in it.

Her world is full of objects, lovingly assembled in massive, exact lists; she loves gardens—The Orchard on Fire, her most rapturous book, is full of precise renderings of plants and flowers—but they melt, very often, into similarly ecstatic accounts of broken toys or cheap jewellery. Many of her boldest effects come simply from an observation of colour; the moment at the end of the first chapter of The Artist's Widow when Lyris, returning from an exhausting and depressing party, sits down in her painter's chair and ‘squeezes out a bead of aquamarine’. Her ability to see spiritual beauty everywhere is almost Japanese; in particular, her excellent short stories often start from physical facts, such as a tank of tropical fish, and then construct lives around them. In A Bowl of Cherries, the lavish evocation of a ratty old novelty shop produces a rhapsody:

Heaps of glittering excelsior, red, green, gold, blue, silver foil trumpets, feathered squeakers, paper fans, black eye-masks and animal faces, a skull, peashooters, magic daggers, tricks, jokes, little silk chinese drums, paper accordions, flutes, indoor fireworks, joss sticks, balloons, spangles, sparklers, sequins; gimcrack gewgaws, evanescent glitter.

Here, there is no overt judgment until the very end of the list, and then the word ‘gimcrack’ is austerely set apart from the rapture with a semi-colon, as if it is quite a different voice from her own. Her interests are very appealing; I adore the girls' schools episodes in so many of her books, from Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger onwards; they are much like the first chapter of Iris Murdoch's The Flight from the Enchanter, a vein Murdoch ought to have pursued. She has, too, the precision of an Opie in her recall of playground chants, and a jolly schoolgirl taste for the really silly joke which is always irresistible—the sign at the beginning of Redhill Rococo which reads ‘Redhill Exhausts and Tyres’, or the character in The Artist's Widow who observes that a girl called Paige ‘sounds like something from a book’. Her novels are full of happy, relieved journeys towards home, with a tart and unindulgent nostalgia, and exist in a densely evoked physical world.

They seem, in recollection, like infinitely generous books; it is surprising to see that, in reality, she makes uncompromising judgments. Again like Murdoch, she likes and closely observes animals; butchers and people affecting to dislike cats are given a rough ride. (She once gave me a very hard time when I was rude about a cat in a novel; I'm not sure I've ever been entirely forgiven.) That's probably just a foible, but a more interesting judgment is a recurrent one on artistic dabblers. Nathan in The Artist's Widow or Jaz in The Orchard on Fire come off particularly badly.

Perhaps this is because Mackay herself is a writer who takes her art very seriously, and who sets herself challenges with each book. As a result, she has grown steadily in authority. A Bowl of Cherries is a deliberate attempt to write more expansively than the clipped, witty style of Music Upstairs; the characters talk, not always quite successfully, as if they have been let off the leash, rather than in a sequence of bons mots. Dunedin, the most varied of her books, is an attempt at a more complicated structure than before; dazzling as it is, the experiment doesn't quite come off. But a novelist who never risks anything is not a novelist worth reading, and the experience of Dunedin went into the intricately patterned, but immensely satisfying The Orchard on Fire, one of the best novels of the 1990s. It is the book of hers where everything seems to come together effortlessly.

Heligoland has a deceptive simplicity which conceals great art, and it manages to convey a big emotional journey in a relatively brief span. It is set in an idealistic urban community, a 1930s experiment in communal living which is still staggering on decades later. In the Nautilus building, a motley collection of aging architects, poets, artists rub along somehow, their grand friends and sorry hangers-on popping in from time to time.

The description of the atmosphere of such a place, the crabby utopianism struggling on in the middle of a philistine and cynical world, is a delight, and the novel is full of brilliant, sharp character sketches—the cast of The Artist's Widow reappears here, seen from a slightly colder angle. Both dreamily speculative and physically precise, the book has a tone and flavour uniquely Mackay's own. At the core of the novel is a profoundly moving study of loneliness, in the central figure of Rowena Snow. She is one of Mackay's uprooted and uncertain heroines; her life has followed no clear path, and at each stage she seems baffled by her own circumstances. From a terrible progressive boarding school, working as a home-help, to her strange and not quite established place at the Nautilus, half cleaner, half patient muse, she has had consistent bad luck and consistent isolation.

It is an extremely sad story, utterly plausible in the gruesome details—the ‘advanced’ school is appallingly enjoyable—but it ends in consolation and optimism, as Rowena starts to see that she might, after all, be able to enjoy a birthday party she never had and thought she never wanted. By then, we are mildly surprised to discover how much we want her to be happy, and in the end she almost is. ‘Rowena doesn't know how to have birthday parties, but suddenly it all seems to be going quite well.’ In Mackay's world, that counts as an epiphany, and if there is a constant conviction in her books that most people worry that they don't know ‘how to do it’, nevertheless, despite everything, in the end things seem to ‘go quite well’. It is a modest sounding triumph, but in the event a deeply moving one, and, like the best of her books, this one concludes in the atmosphere of a long-anticipated quiet homecoming.