"Love Over Scotland" by Alexander McCall Smith

The third in the Scotland Street series of novels that includes:

• 44 Scotland Street
• Espresso Tales
• Love Over Scotland
• The World According to Bertie
• The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

One of the difficulties when you are publishing a series of novels such as this, with a large cast of recurring characters, must be how you ensure that the books are different. This book opens with Pat fancying a boy called Wolf ... but another in the series also opens with Pat fancying a boy. Bertie plays the saxophone and battles with his mother; the family car has gone missing again. Matthew years for Pat, again. Angus takes Cyril for a walk, again. For the first third of this book I had an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu; I believed I had already read the book. Perhaps this is a strength in that it attests to the strength of the familiar characters as in a TV soap opera. Perhaps this is also why authors are forced to resort to ever more extreme plot lines.

Alexander McCall Smith gently muses over the lives of his characters inhabiting the most genteel part of Edinburgh.

The strength of the books for me lies in the astute observations that he makes. Many of these things have been said many times before ... but they are worth saying:

• “Artists were allowed to look, he thought - no artist could really be considered a voyeur. Looking was what an artist was trained to do, and if an artist did not look, then he would not see.” (C 4)
• “He knew that his life was an adjunct life, lived in the shadow of his master.” (C 7)
• “Smells were like a palimpsest: odour laid upon odour, smells that could be peeled off to reveal the whiff below.” (C 7)
• “The unmerited dislike of others made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike.” (C 14)
• “The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us.” (C 17)
• “People fell in love with those who belonged to others. It happened all the time in fiction, and presumably in real life, too.” (C 24)
• “How many lonely women the length and breadth of Britain found Radio Four a very satisfactory substitute for a man? And Radio Four could so easily be turned off, just like that, whereas men ...” (C 29)
• “His eyes were fixed on the floor, hoping to locate the geological flaw which would swallow him up and save him from his current embarrassment. But of course there was none; at no time is the earth more firm than when we wish that it were not.” (C 39)
• “Such circumstances as these, she thought, remind us of just what we are: salt and water, for the most part.” (C 47)
• "This knowledge that Angus was not with him, made the world as dark and cold as if the sun had dropped out of the sky." (C 51)
• "He wanted to hit Larch, but he understood that principle which everybody, but particularly politicians and statesmen, understand very well: you only ever hit weaker people." (C 54)
• "The light thrown out by the Tilley lamp was soft and forgiving, a light that did not fight with the darkness but nudged it aside gently, just for a few feet, and then allowed it back." (C 56)
• "Although we are most secure - in one sense - in our own homes, we are also at our most vulnerable, for the social persona, the one we carry out with us into the world, cannot be worn at ho,e all the time." (C 80)
• "Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most of us never bother to cultivate." (C 112)

January 2019

"Friends, Lovers, Chocolate" by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the second book in the series starting with, and named after, The Sunday Philosophy Club starring philosopher and amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie. Like the 44 Scotland Street books, Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh which is depicted as a genteel village, everyone being middle class and educated and knowing one another. Not exactly Train-Spotting or Rebus!

In this book Dalhousie muses on life while meandering through it. She rather fancies her niece's ex-boyfriend who, unfortunately, still has the hots for the niece. There is the possibility of a dalliance with a handsome Italian. And she tries to solve the mystery of whether the memory of a heart transplant patient might be a 'cellular memory' of the killer of the heart donor.

It is remarkable how McCall Smith can weave a page-turning tale from such gentle observation of not-very-exciting gentlefolks. But he can.

There are one or two acute observations and there are lots of philosophical insights:

• "the stone was flaking slightly, and a patch had fallen off here and there, like a ripened scab, exposing fresh skin below." (C 1)
• "we must be judgemental ... when there is something to be judged." (C 1)
• "The bundle of urges and wants that went with being a physical being ... were at the bottom of most disputes between people." (C 3)
• "We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it. History ... could so quickly become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination." (C 5)
• "Weather was a test of attitude ... Nice people ... were nice about the weather; nasty people were nasty about it." (C 8)
• "She could think of nothing worse that sitting for hours under an umbrella, an open invitation to sandflies, looking out to sea." (C 8)
• "Narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about ... we feted these people and fed their vanity." (C 9)
• "If we lived in a global village, then the boundaries of our responsibility were greatly extended. The people dying of poverty, the sick, the dispossessed, were our neighbours even if they were far away." (C 9)
• "Should one let people express their gratitude properly, even if one is embarrassed or reluctant to do so? There is an art in accepting a present, and indeed there is sometimes an obligation to let others give." (C 9)
• "She did not approve of promiscuity, which she thought made a mockery of our duty to cherish and respect others; an emotional fast food, really, which one would not wish on anybody. But at the same time one should not starve oneself." (C 11)
• "To be loved by the unlovable was not something that most people could cope with." (C 13)
• "'It's a Sisyphean labour for me. I push a rock up a hill and then it rolls down again'. 'Everyone's job is like that ... I wash things and they become dirty and need washing again'." (C 16)
• "Equality was dull, and goodness was dull too ... Peace was dull; conflict and violence were exciting."(C 16)
• "If one followed the well-ordered life one would start each day with the writing of one's letters of apology." (C 21)
•  "Sometimes the trips not taken are better than those one actually takes." (C 21)
• "Resolution. Musicians know all about that, don't they. Pieces of music seek resolution, have to end on a particular note, or it sounds all wrong. The same applies to our lives." (C 23)

AMS has also written:

• 44 Scotland Street
• Espresso Tales
• The World According to Bertie

January 2019

"The Sunday Philosophy Club" by Alexander McCall Smith

Set in the same genteel and refined Edinburgh as the 44 Scotland Street stories (including Espresso tales and The world according to Bertie), Isabel Dalhousie is a gentlewoman with her own house and a housekeeper. Following a failed marriage and childless, she edits a philosophical review; otherwise she is a lady of leisure. At a night out listening to the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra she witnesses a young man fall from the Gods to his death in the Stalls. Or was he pushed? The stage is set for a gentle exploration of applied ethics, in particular whether and when one should tell a lie.

There is just enough plot to keep the pages turning but the main delight of this book lies in the intriguing insights of Ms Dalhousie. Here are just some of them:

• “She always felt inhibited from any act suggesting a lack of concentration or, worse still, of seriousness.” (C 1)
• “Something terrible happened and people began to shake. It was the reminder that frightened them; the reminder of just how close to the edge we are in life, always, at every moment.” (C 1)
• “You loved another, and this made you so vulnerable; just an inch or so too close to the edge and your world would change.” (C 2)
• “You had to be aware of human weakness, of course, because it simply was, but to revel in it seems to her to be voyeurism.” (C 2)
• “Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?” (C 3)
• “Why, she wondered, should anyone actually want a hunk, when nonhunks were so much more interesting?” (C 4)
• “Only the very immature and the very stupid are impressed by the depraved.” (C 5)
• “Respectability was such an effort though, and there were bars and clubs where people might go and behave as they really wanted to behave, but did not dare so publicly.” (C 5)
• “How arid it must be to be a man; how constrained; what a whole world of emotion, and sympathy, they must lack; like living in a desert.” (C 7)
• “I have bags of failings. Same as anybody else. Bags.” (C 13)
• “Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one to treat them with complete seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs. Some people, the selfish, had no inclination to do this ... They were impatient with those who they thought did not count: the old, the inarticulate, the disadvantaged.” (C 14)
• “She was turned into a different station from most people and the tuning dial was broken.” (C 14)
• “Camus was right: the ultimate philosophical question was suicide. If there was no truth, then there was no meaning, and our life was Sisyphean. And if life was Sisyphean, thenn what point in continuing with it?” (C 17)
• “The gulls were considered a pest in the neighbourhood - large, mewing birds that swooped down on those who came too close to their nesting places - but we humans built too, and left cement and stones and litter, and were as aggressively territorial.” (C 21)
• “Why was it wrong to drop litter? Was it purely an aesthetic objection, based on the notion that the superficial pollution of the environment was unattractive? Or was the aesthetic impact linked to some notion of the distress which others felt in the face of litter? If that was the case, then we might even have a duty to look attractive to others, in order to minimise their distress.” (C 21)
• “In a world of need, it was wrong to be anything other than thin. Until everybody was in a position to consume a surfeit of calories, then nobody should carry extra weight. The fat with therefore not entitled to be what they were .” (C 21)
• “People give themselves away every five seconds. Watch the movement of eyes. It says absolutely everything you need to know.” (C 23)

Some challenging ideas!

I also very much enjoyed the next book in this series: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate.

December 2018; 281 pages

"Espresso Tales" by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the sequel to 44 Scotland Street.

Bruce embarks on a career as a wine dealer, knowing little about wine. Pat gets invited to a nudist party (“A nudist? In Edinburgh? Does he realise what parallel we're on?” p 188) Matthew's dad has a girlfriend and Matthew thinks she is after his dad's eleven million pounds. And poor Bertie, forced to wear pink dungarees, is sent to primary school when all he really wants to do is get on the train the Glasgow and play cards against a Glasgow gangster.

Another whimsical and affectionate set of stories from Edinburgh.

Some great lines:

• “September was not far off, and after that, as was well known to all but the most confused, was October - and darkness.” (p 1)
• “Scottish weather ... made one thing abundantly clear: you paid for what you enjoyed, and you usually paid quite promptly. ... That vista of mountains and sea lochs was all very well, but what was that coming up behind you? A cloud of midges.” (p 1)
• “How very few are the human bonds that lie between us and the state of being completely alone.” (p 7)
• “I think it's marvelous the boys have all those different things to choose from at the chemist’s these days. Hair things and shaving things, that is.” (p 29)
• “People often fundamentally misread American society and assume that decisions articulated by men are male decisions - a serious mistake.” (p 31)
• “The problem with missing socks was that the rational interpretation seemed quite inadequate” (p 84)
• “He liked Scotland exactly as it was: unfussy, cold, and half-visible.” (p 116)
• “The problem ... is that the cost-cutters are in control ... They are the ones who are insisting that everything be cheap and built to the nearest specifications.” (p 185)
• “I've never understood the objection to hypocrisy ... There must be some circumstances in which it permissible to be hypocritical.” (p 284)
• “Like every author, he knew that he had to guard jealously the spare hours in which he could write.” (p 289)

September 2017; 342 pages

"Body Politic" by Paul Johnston

March 2020. Edinburgh is an independent city state ruled by a Board of celibate Guardians with Platonic ideals and guardsmen (Auxiliaries) who are officially known only by barrack name and number. It runs casinos and a red light district for tourists, its main source of income. Quintilian Dalrymple demoted Auxiliary, works in the Parks and moonlights as a private investigator. But a murder has been committed and the Guardians have need of him.

Despite the weird setting, this was really just an average crime thriller about the hunt for a serial killer. Sex, violence and Plato. Some good metaphors "weirder than sweet-smelling sewage" and some that felt, frankly, forced: "He looked so welcoming that I clenched my buttocks"; "the fog had returned and was settling over the city as thickly as the mustard gas in a Wilfred Owen poem"; "Then, out of my favourite colour, an idea came to me".

September 2016; 345 pages