An interviewer asked Alexander McCall Smith how long it took to write one of his novels. McCall Smith smilingly dodged the question. Given his rate of production, the answer must be “not very long.” But what does it matter? After all, Dan Brown required years to complete The Lost Symbol.
Best known for the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency—ten books in this splendid series have already appeared, and No. 11, The Double Comfort Safari Club, is due in April from Pantheon—McCall Smith also maintains several other lines. Most of these have turned out not to be my cup of tea. One notable exception is the series set in Edinburgh featuring Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. Launched in September 2004 with The Sunday Philosophy Club, the series has proceeded with pleasing regularity, a new book coming each fall, most recently The Lost Art of Gratitude.
Like the adventures of Mma Ramotswe in Botswana, these tales centering on Isabel Dalhousie are severely stylized, though with a different set of conventions, drawn chiefly from the comedy of manners, with a few borrowings from the light mystery genre and a strong element of what be called philosophical comedy, the most distinctive quality of the books. At times we see Isabel at work as an editor—reading manuscripts, for instance, and reflecting on the way a particular philosophical problem has been treated. Even here, comedy may enter in, as it does in this book when Isabel’s antagonist, the odious Professor Dove, pops up again, aided and abetted by Professor Lettuce. But much more often we get Isabel as the Philosopher of Everyday Life:
If a transcription of our day’s speech would make uncomfortable reading, how much more dismaying, perhaps, would be a record of our thoughts. For a moment she imagined how it would look …. Isabel paused, unwilling to reach a conclusion so solipsistic, but unable to avoid it: the leitmotiv would be me. It was that simple. Most of us, most of the time, were thinking about ourselves.
But was that really bleak, or just human? We were, after all, ourselves: that was all we really knew, and the only point from which we could act. We could think of others, of course, and did, but such thoughts were often about others in the context of what they had said to us, what they had done to us.
She looked at Jamie, who stirred.
“Jamie,” she whispered. She had not intended to, but did. She uttered his name, as if to confirm the fact that he was there: we named things and they became more real.
The movement of Isabel’s thoughts here is characteristic. (A philosopher friend of mine, who tried one of the books in the series and didn’t care for it, observed dismissively that “real philosophers don’t think like that.”) One thought suggests another, often modifying or contradicting the first. Looking at Jamie, she is at once confirming and contradicting the observation she has just made about our inevitable self-centeredness.
Jamie is Isabel’s lover—in the course of this book, he proposes marriage to her, and she joyfully says yes—and the father of their 18-month-old son, Charlie. Jamie, who plays and teaches the bassoon, is a good deal younger than Isabel, around thirty to her early forties, a very handsome as well as winsome young man. Comedy often works by inverting familiar formulas. Isabel’s profession is stereotypically male, so she counters slack assumptions about “the female mind” even as she practices philosophy emphatically as a woman. So too with Isabel and Jamie’s relationship. Were their ages reversed, there would be nothing to remark, yet the gap in their ages is not only mined for comedy. It provides occasions for Isabel to muse on their love in a way that is very moving but that could otherwise easily seem forced. And of course—especially for women readers no longer in their twenties, say—it is pure wish-fulfillment, like the much more common equivalent for many male readers.
Some critics—including some of McCall Smith’s fellow Scottish writers—have fumed about the extent to which the series is nothing but a preposterous confection of wish-fulfilling fantasy. We’re urged to feel contempt for writing that so obviously fails to reckon with the dark realities of modern life. Certainly Isabel Dalhousie enjoys a privileged existence. She’s not only intelligent, lovely, and generous—she’s independently wealthy. Concerts, gallery-going (she owns a number of very fine paintings), conversations with guests such as the Auden scholar Edward Mendelson (many names are dropped in these books): such is her daily round. There’s a trusty housekeeper, Grace, to watch over Charlie whenever needed. And of course there is Jamie. True, there are shadows, as in even the most privileged of lives (not least, the memory of a failed first marriage to a man who treated her very badly), yet altogether a rather sunny picture.
McCall Smith is well aware of this. He has created a fictional microworld to highlight aspects of the ungraspable Real that are given short shrift in a lot of contemporary fiction. His books don’t pretend to give a full account of our common life, but they offer a counter-story that both delights and instructs. Isabel—and through her, the reader—savors the pleasures of food and companionship, the wonder of a child, the haunting presence of Brother Fox (who visits her yard in each book). She has a witty sense of the incongruity of our experience as thinking animals. And all this moves her to immense gratitude, which the book itself unashamedly urges on us as well.
And I am grateful in turn to Alexander McCall Smith, even as I brood over what is missing in these books. Isabel, so curious, so tirelessly wondering, seems very little inclined to wonder about the ultimate source of goodness to whom our gratitude should be directed. Thoughts about God, or gods, or what other people think about God or gods, rarely cross Isabel’s mind. When they do, she tends toward a self-satisfied tolerance. Late in this book, Jamie asks Isabel a question that he can’t quite bring himself to finish: “Do you believe in … “
Isabel finishes for him, and answers: “Not in the white-bearded sense. But I sense something that is beyond me. I’m not sure I would give it the name God. But one could, if one wanted to.” Well, yes, one could, if one were that sort of person, a bit simple, you know.
“And what about you?” she asked gently.
“I don’t think about it very much. It’s not really the sort of thing that I think much about.”
The answer pleased her. She would not have wanted him to reveal a certainty concealed up to this point. And there was something unattractive about a belief that excluded all doubt.
“But you’re not an out-and-out atheist? You don’t deride people who believe in God?”
Again his answer pleased her. “No, not at all. People need some idea … some idea where they are.”
“Exactly.”
Maybe not “exactly.”
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
