Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Uncharted Island by Olga Wojtas review: 'a delightful novel'

Morningside librarian Shona McMonagle returns for more time-travelling adventures in this charming, eccentric and very funny novel, writes Allan Massie

Given how crazy much of the world today seems, it’s strange that there seem to be fewer light-hearted comic novelists than was the case 60 or 70 years ago. Happily, a few dare to lift their head over the parapet. One is Olga Wojtas.

Her short, elegant novels feature the Morningside librarian Shona McMonagle, the now middle-aged former prefect at Miss Blaine’s School for Girls, first brought to wider notice by an earlier alumna Miss Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Miss Blaine and Shona spend some of their time removing and concealing copies of this scandalous novel and in deploring its promotion by Miss Spark’s biographer Alan Taylor, himself once a librarian and therefore a man who should have known better.

This is by the way and when we first come on Shona she is reading Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and finding it deplorably dull. She learned high standards at Miss Blaine’s School for Girls.

She has reason for her low opinion of Crusoe, for she herself is an accomplished and remarkable traveller, whose adventures are very much livelier than poor Crusoe’s, for Miss Blaine dispatches her not only to distant lands but to times past. With commendable restraint, Wojtas dismisses the remarkable achievement in a brief, off-hand manner. Splendid and very welcome; no tedious pseudo-science.

Her last excursion into the past took her to early Renaissance Venice, and a dangerous time she had there. Happily her excursions last for only a week, perhaps as long as the Morningside Library will spare her, and this time she is whisked to an island in the Baltic, where at first she encounters ship-wrecked mariners lurking in caves.

They know nothing of the settlement across the hills but are in terror of a monster out for their blood. Even Shona’s good Morningside sense can’t persuade them that monsters are mythical creatures. At least one of the shipmates has been murdered. It must have been the monster’s work and fear confines them to their separate caves.

On the other side of the island Shona finds a settlement of indigenous people, one of them a striking and commanding woman who has a surprising knowledge of aspects of Scottish history. Shona communicates easily with the locals – as indeed with the ship-wrecked sailors – because she has a remarkable knowledge of varieties of Scandinavian, Danish and German dialects, evidence no doubt of the high quality of her education.

Still, she doesn’t get everything right. She thinks for instance that the woman who calls herself a detective may actually be the murderer of the shipwrecked sailor. The settlement is very agreeable, though the teabags are made with sheep’s wool. There is an agreeable lady choirmaster, a charming girl who keeps a craft shop, a surly farmer and the councillor, a dim bureaucrat drawn, I like to think, from Edinburgh life.

Olga Wojtas | Lisa Ferguson for The Scotsman

It is all charming and often amusing, but Wojtas never forgets that the novel tells a story. Some authors of comic novels have often forgotten this and their novels are the feebler for it.

Elements of the plot may be silly, as some are here, but the plot is needed to keep things moving; and Wojtas understands its importance.

It’s a delightful novel and a cunning piece of craftsmanship, a novel to make you smile and – remarkably today – laugh out loud. The tone is so light and assured I found myself thinking of the great black and-white Ealing comedies – The Lavender Hill Mob and, appropriately for Wojtas’s theme, A Passport to Pimlico. She brings off her fantasy in such a natural way it doesn’t seem fantastic at all.

Actually, there are times when the light-footed prose and well controlled imagination recall the early novels of Muriel Spark herself. Perhaps when Miss Blaine wasn’t about, her favourite prefect surreptitiously delighted in the early Spark novels such as Memento Mori and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. She may even have smuggled a copy of Miss Brodie’s scandalous Prime of Miss Jean Brodie into her bedroom. Be that as it may, her prose often echoes Spark’s. High praise of course. This book is delightful fun anyway, and considerably more lively than Robinson Crusoe.

Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Uncharted Island, by Olga Wojtas, Saraband, £10.99