Scotland Street review: Love Over Scotland

Love Over Scotland

Published on Saturday 19 August 2006 00:53

By Alexander McCall Smith

Polygon, 357pp, 14.99

Despite what the massed ranks of Fringe stand-ups may tell you, comedy doesn’t

always have to have a victim, doesn’t always have to wound or burn. It can be lambent

- unshowy yet illuminating - too.

Like the rest of the series, it is set in the capital, but ranges far beyond. As easily as

taking us down Dundas Street, with the Fife Hills in the distance, it can transport us to

a pirate village in the Malacca Straits or, equally bizarrely, into the mind of a dog with

a gold tooth. Quintessentially Edinburgh topics are up for discussion (one chapter is

entitled “Smugness Explained”) but there will also be the kind of esoterica that we

might not have known - such as how Proust’s la recherche du temps perdu would

translate into pidgin English.

But whatever it addresses - whether it is sixth-century Celtic saints, pushy parenting

or the standards of behaviour to be expected in Moray Place, this is humour with a

very rare extra ingredient: moral grace. McCall Smith doesn’t go for easy laughs,

nor does his humour have victims: at every turn his fiction insists on courtesy and

consideration for other people and takes a stand against cynicism and selfishness.

Those are precisely the same principles which underlie the No 1 Ladies’ Detective

Agency series: gloriously old-fashioned, perhaps, but none the worse for that.

Antonia, a novelist who is working on a book about Celtic saints, even goes so far as

to admit that she’s struggling to find an ending in which her characters live happily

ever after. “Do you really want it to be otherwise?” she asks.

Given the state of the world, the answer has to be no. Of course we want Bertie, the

hot-housed six-year-old, to enjoy the childhood his mother seems determined to deny

him. We want Angus Lordie, failed portrait painter in an unfashionable part of the

New Town, to be reunited with his gold-toothed dog Cyril. We want Matthew, mild-

mannered art dealer, to find love even though we don’t expect him to.

McCall Smith gives us the happy endings real life seldom does. As Angus Lordie

scans a newspaper, he is depressed by “seemingly endless vistas of conflict opening

up in every corner of the world”. We know the feeling: but we also know that without

ignoring wars and disasters, there is another, lighter and unhurting side to life too. It

is McCall Smith’s particular genius to be able to look on the brighter side of life, and

he’s seldom done so more enjoyably.