An unkind critic, should such be found, might apply the same description to Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street novels. Certainly they do go on, and, to adapt the metaphor slightly, the tale seems to be spun effortlessly. Other novelists can
only eye with envy McCall Smith's apparently inexhaustible ability to conjure up characters and incidents, devise conversations, and mix comedy with moral reflections on the way we live now and how we should behave. It all seems so easy, so easy indeed that, for a moment, one may doubt the truth of the old adage that "easy reading is hard writing".
As everyone knows, 44 Scotland Street was first published as a daily novel in this newspaper, and the subsequent books in the series – this is the fifth – have all first appeared in that form. This by itself is enough to make one marvel, for writing an 800-word daily episode requires uncommon skill; it must be interesting or amusing, and complete in itself, while also contributing to the greater whole. Radio and television serials like The Archers or Coronation Street will employ a team of writers; McCall Smith does it all by himself.
There's little point, in a review for The Scotsman, in dwelling much on the characters. Most readers are likely to know them well, and to have formed their own likes and dislikes. McCall Smith recycles his familiar cast, while adroitly introducing some new faces. One or two of the old faithful are seen in a new light: the previously appalling Bruce, one of the few for whom it seemed the author had very little sympathy, is even allowed to turn over a new leaf, having been brought up sharp against himself and suffering a crisis of confidence. Can he maintain it, or will the old Bruce come to the fore again? That's perhaps a question to be carried over to the next series.
McCall Smith mixes acute observation and convincingly true-to-life scenes and conversations with a fair amount of fantasy, some of which may be judged by harsher critics to crumble into whimsy. The passages about Jacobitism and the arrival of a Belgian Jacobite Pretender are examples of this, and don't, to my mind, work. But others will disagree. This sort of work is aimed at a wide readership and you certainly can't hope to please all the people all the time. So, for instance, I find the conversations between six- year-old Bertie and his fellow pupils at the Steiner School straining credulity.
There is, of course, a serious purpose to McCall Smith's writing. He is not only an entertainer, but a moralist. He believes in kindness, friendship, generosity of spirit and good manners, and believes, I think, that these admirable qualities are under-represented in much admired contemporary fiction. On the whole, he thinks well of his fellow humans, believing most of us want to behave well most of the time. He thinks especially well of his beloved Edinburgh, so well, some might say, that he ignores the city's darker side.
He is not without a self-indulgent side, evident in his occasional introduction of some of his real-life friends into the narrative. This may amuse them; he treats them so kindly it can scarcely fail to do so. It probably amuses all those among his readers who recognise the names, but I'm not sure that it is really a good idea, if only because they can't be examined as he examines his fictional characters.
In his conviction that life is, on the whole, good, McCall Smith is inevitably a critic of how society has developed in our lifetime. He has his asocial anthropologist, Dom-enica MacDonald, say: "In the Sixties we thought we could get rid of everything. Rituals were exposed as meaningless. Restraint was taken as a sign of inhibition. Personal authenticity was all. Behave as you wanted to. Liberate yourself … Of course, we're now finding out the consequences of that… Look at the way people behave in the streets at night. Look at the rudeness, the discourtesy, the ugliness and violence of our public space. It's very uncool , isn't it, to point out that we are a society in dissolution."
McCall Smith would have us put it together again, and the serious purpose of the Scotland Street novels is to show how each of us can, by the way we behave, contribute to doing so.
The full article contains 758 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
