Month: July 2015

Alexander McCall Smith is well-loved for his series of books, starting with the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series set in Africa, and followed by the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs, the Scotland Street series and the Corduroy Mansions series.

Just out is a new Isabel Dalhousie story.  She is the philosopher who lives in Edinburgh with her husband, Jamie, and young son, Charlie. Isabel spends part of her time editing The Review of Applied Ethics, with articles from all over the world. As well as that she is often approached by friends who have a mystery they can’t solve right in Edinburgh. Isabel can’t resist these problems and this book tells the story of a small boy who insists he had an earlier life and knows exactly what island off the coast of Scotland was his home. Isabel meets his mother, and also makes the trip to the island with her own family.

She gently uncovers the mystery and we get to spend time in kindly, sociable (and beautiful) Scotland, with a writer, unlike many today, who watches for the upbeat and leaves us happy. McCall Smith is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh. He was born  in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He now lives in Scotland.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

There’s a lot of discussion about Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, and no wonder.

The fact is, it was written decades before Lee’s famous To Kill a Mockingbird of l960, but wasn’t discovered until much later. The author apparently considered it a draft version of the later prize-winning novel, and put it away.

The new book tells what happened 20 years after the events described in Mockingbird. While we all loved Atticus Finch, Scout and Jem, I think the real reason for Mockingbird‘s success is that we were satisfied with what we learned about them at the time and don’t really need upgrading to the story.

In the new book there continues a brilliant up-close picture of Maycomb Junction in the South. Harper Lee was born in l926 in Monroeville, Alabama. It brings back the values that get thrown into doubt, both then and still today. Harper Lee’s writing remains precise and wise.

Maybe Go Set a Watchman should be sold to schools and colleges with English departments, teaching writing, as an illustration of how a first draft can be developed into a best-seller.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

The Franco-Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, has long been loved for his sly, witty books on modern life, some of the best-known being: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,  Ignorance,  and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s 15 years since his last book and critics suggest this may well be his final summing up.

The new book is the story of the friendship between four men living in Paris.  They are an odd collection: Ramon is in his 60’s and retired from teaching in a university; Charles is in his 40’s and caters for parties; Caliban is an actor looking for work; Alain is younger and still trying to reach his mother, who abandoned him in childhood. The women are mostly absent and pretty unappealing. But for the men, their friendship is sacred and Kundera, a famous ironist, is completely sincere when he writes about this.

There are a couple of heavy dream sequences but on the whole the book is short, without the eroticism of Kundera’s earlier novels but rather a look at a bruised male unease. The point is really summed up by Ramon’s hymn to insignificance, the world that is just itself  “in all its obviousness, all its innocence, in all its beauty.”

Reviewed by Anne McDougall