Book review: A Conspiracy of Friends

IN his preface to The Betrothed, Sir Walter Scott imagined novels being created by a steam engine. The technology back then being fairly primitive, the only thing the novel machine could handle were predictable elements such as the love speeches of the hero, descriptions of the heroine, a few moral observations and the obligatory happy ending.

For a long while now, there have been rumours that Alexander McCall Smith has a developed a similar machine on which to create his own fictions. The main argument for its existence is that no normal human being is capable of producing quite as many novels in a single year. In 2011, for example, he (or his machine) will have written five.

Yet McCall Smith's novel-writing machine works on discernible rules. Alert readers will detect a certain overlap in the computer program that produced this, the third in his Corduroy Mansions series, and the one responsible for his 44 Scotland Street series. Both have particularly obvious villains: here the otiose Oedipus Snark, "possibly the first ever nasty Liberal Democrat MP". Both have wildly absurd plots: here, one which involves a man being kidnapped in Colombia and forced to work as a gigolo on a cruise liner.

The true elegance of the McCall Smith novel-writing machine lies in the fact that for all the comic absurdity of storylines – no sooner have we finished with the story of the reluctant gigolo, for example, than we are being introduced to an English-speaking yeti – the stories themselves have a very sure and sometimes detailed moral sensibility.

McCall Smith has always been a dab hand at the moral dilemma – he has tank-loads of them dilemmas ready for insertion into his plot at the press of a button. That old staple, "Can men and women ever be friends?" is here, as is "Is love just a brief madness?" and "To what extent is bad behaviour inherited?" The strangest dilemma in A Conspiracy of Friends is that romantic novelists' chestnut – "Should a woman ever declare her love to her husband's best friend?" As the friend in question is the obviously decent, likeable William French, the answer is clearly No. Which doesn't make it a particularly convincing dilemma and leads one to suspect the presence of a computer virus in the machine.

McCall Smith's true genius lies in his ability to write random elements into otherwise predictable code. Few writers, for example, have penetrated the mind of dogs quite as effectively. The lyrical, frightening scenes of French's Pimlico terrier and former undercover spy dog Freddie de la Hay, separated from his master in the Suffolk countryside, recall Douglas Adams at his finest.

Anyone who has just written a sentence containing "former undercover spy dog" knows that the unpredictability of McCall Smith's subject matter doesn't have to be laboured. This is his fiction's X-factor – but there's more it to than that. Even if other novelists were writing about Pimlico terriers and their owners, I doubt whether any of them could do so with McCall Smith's gentle wit, intelligence and moral grace.

It's this – the cast of a well-stocked, fun-loving, original mind – that we look for and find in McCall Smith's fiction. Either that or some pretty damn amazing novel-writing machine.