Book review: Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Gondola Of Doom, by Olga Wojtas
Shona McMonagle is a 50-or-so Morningside librarian, educated at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, formerly described by Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a novel deeply resented by Ms McMonagle. So, she is a fictional character with a low view of one of Scotland’s most famous fictional characters. This is no more important than someone taking against Sherlock Holmes, relevant only because there is something Sparkish in Olga Wojtas and something of Jean Brodie’s self-assurance in Shona.
This is the fourth of this series of novels, and I haven’t read the first three. It is droll, light, witty, whimsical, written in the first person. McMonagle is a very Morningside lady, but one with a difference, being a time traveller, something that Morningside ladies are only in their dreams. She is a time traveller, dispatched by Marcia Blaine herself, on missions into the past, how and why being unimportant. Here she is dispatched into 17th century Venice, though at first she thinks she may have arrived in Stockholm, another city with canals. But the language is evidently Venetian. Not surprisingly she can speak it. She can also, we discover, converse with a dolphin, its talk coming in a sort of Morse Code. Well, anything is possible when you time travel.
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Hide AdThere is an outbreak of bubonic plague in he city. She falls in with a group of doctors who wear protective clothing and bird-like headgear, each with a different herb or spice, supposedly to ward off infection. Though no doctor herself, she has of course certain advantages over them, such medical knowledge as she has being some 300 years ahead of theirs. Not surpisingly they view her with some suspicion, though they don’t realize she is a woman. Time travel blurs quite a lot, it seems.
She is also fortunate to make friends with a librarian called Zen, who is impressed by Edinburgh’s publishing history and is happy to be told she is a librarian herself, not a doctor. This proves to be fortunate.
As the title suggests, the outbreak of plague is connected with gondolas, or at least with one gondola family firm, the Cornettos. (Surely they should be the “Cornetti”?) Certainly a lot of the plague victims seem to have travelled on Cornetto gondolas. But things aren’t, happily, what they seem to be, as Shona soon discovers. She will only be in Venice (and the 17th century) for a week, but – goodness – what a lot she packs into her time, being arrested, threatened with quarantine and, more alarmingly, with execution. But thanks to her librarian friend and an interview with the City’s Doge, a charming fellow lacking in self-confidence, we can be sure she will be safely returned to Morningside.
It may, I suppose, be impossible to kill a time traveller; an interesting question anyway. At the end she will point the way to what will be Venice’s future, no longer holding, as Wordsworth put it, “the gorgeous East in fee” but as a city dependent on tourism. Rather sad of course.
It’s a delightful froth of a book. Some reviewers of earlier novels in the series have compared Wojtas to Wodehouse, and indeed I did find myself laughing quite often, but there are echoes rather of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson or Seven Men, also perhaps of Peter Pan. Be that as it may, to come upon a comic novel that provokes laughter is rare today, has indeed been so since Kingsley Amis died. The story is witty, well-constructed, elegant and engaging, written with an agreeably light touch, and sufficiently self-assured to make the fancy acceptable.
Still, one was pleased to find Ms McMonagle safely back in her Morningside library, suppressing copies of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and eating vanilla ice creams with Marcia Blaine, who must herself be getting on a bit, or even time travelling since, according to Spark, she was a headmistress in the 1930s.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Gondola Of Doom, by Olga Wojtas, Contraband, £9.99