Good news from Alexander McCall Smith

September 27, 2004

Anyone else warmed and enchanted by the adventures of Mma Precious Ramotswe and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana can only rejoice at a book review in today's NYTimes. Alexander McCall Smith has launched another series, set in Edinburgh this time, with The Sunday Philosophy Club. To describe his books as "inviting readers into a world of kindness, gentility, and creature comforts" may not provide unambiguous illumination inasmuch as certain edgy postmodernists and over-educated snobs who prowl the fringe of Good&Happy held themselves for a long time aloof from investigating the popular series, leery of popular sentimentality.

Imagine then the salubrious shock of engaging an un-put-down-able paperback of The Kalahari Typing School for Men, when several of us here noticed tears spurting and laughter erupting in tandem, with a swiftness even Trollope had never effected, and for reasons we could not begin to explain.

Now McCall Smith's new heroine of a certain age, Isabel Dalhousie, articles editor for the Scottishly-apt apocryphal Review of Applied Ethics, sounds just the cup of leisurely, atmospheric, epicurean tea near a warm stone hearth. The accidental death of a beautiful youth,

leads Isabel to thoughts of Rupert Brooke and Byron, and to the kind of double negative that most philosophers like to avoid. Perhaps such a loss is sad "because we love the beautiful more; or because Death's momentary victory is all the greater," Isabel thinks. "Nobody, he says, smiling, is too beautiful not to be taken by me."

It is embarrassing to acknowledge that, on particularly frenetic days, out of the corner of my eye, I sometimes glimpse Hyacinth Bucket in the mirror. Perhaps the philosophical Isabel Dalhousie will offer a more beneficent role model. In more practical terms, her appearance on the scene guarantees books enough to last for years, if any local husbands are tempted to despair of finding easy no-fault gift ideas.