Author: Hilary

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

A number of stories have come out of the famous Buckinghamshire mansion called Bletchley, where Britain housed its code-breaking team during World War II. The best-known is that of Alan Turing, a key code-breaker who is widely regarded as a father of the modern computer.

No real account, however, has been given of the work of the girls at Bletchley who, by l944, had outnumbered the men by three to one. Tessa Dunlop tackles this subject in her current book, The Bletchley Girls, and she does so as a qualified historian. She received the Gertrude Easton History prize at Oxford University and has been awarded a PhD scholarship at Sheffield Hallam University.

She picks fourteen women, still alive in their nineties, and gives a detailed account of how they all wound up  in the code-breaking organization. It turns out it was young girls who operated the unwieldy machinery, made sense of wireless sound waves and sorted the decoded messages that would eventually help lead the Allies to victory and the world into the information age. They had all signed the Official Secrets Act, and so for years none really knew what they had done.  Tessa Dunlop tells how Bletchley was dependent on radio interceptions. Scattered across Britain with international outposts as remote as New Delhi and Columbia, Y-stations, big and small,  were the nerve centres of an eavesdropping operation, intercepting the gobbledygook messages to pass on to Bletchley Park. Some 8,500- 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Y-stations. This is a fascinating account of what they achieved.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a book by a man who is an author himself, has worked in a bookstore selling books and now edits them and writes reviews.

Andy Miller is 37  years old and lives outside London with his wife and young son. You get the impression that books fill his life almost entirely. He calls The Year of Reading Dangerously a work of literary criticism but adds it is also a memoir and a confession. He had come to the point in his life where he felt he must tackle a list of the most famous books in the world. He calls this The Hundred Books which influenced me most. But the book he writes is based on The List of Betterment and these are the fifty books he describes here.

He puts two or three books together for each chapter, sometimes a funny combination,  e.g. Hilary Mantel, George and Weedon Grossmith, and Charles Dickens…or Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code)  or Leo Tolstoy and P.G. Wodehouse.

He is frank and funny about his own tastes and it makes for an amusing and original book and a new slant on the authors he writes about.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

James Wolfe and Louis-Joseph Montcalm both came from families who for centuries had served in their country’s armies: the Wolfes in Wales, Ireland and finally England; the Montcalms in France. When these two men faced each other on the Plains of Abraham, they had a lot riding on the outcome.

In this book, Roch Carrier gives us careful background details of the events leading up to the famous day in September l759. The Seven Years War had seen fighting between the French and English including Wolfe’s success in taking Louisburg. The question was how to take Quebec City. For some time the Governor General Vaudreuil, who was in charge of the troops in Quebec, had not got along with the commander from the troops sent from France, Louis-Joseph Montcalm. In the most exciting part of this book, Carrier describes Wolfe’s decision to scale the tall cliff overlooking a farmer’s field owned by Abraham Martin and allow the rest of the British army to climb the cliff behind and attack the French troops under Montcalm who was not prepared for these tactics.

Carrier describes the two warriors: Wolfe very tall and skinny and often ill, especially from sea-sickness, attached to his mother for remedies; Montcalm steadier, with a family waiting for him in France. Carrier himself is one of Canada’s finest writers as novelist, playwright and children’s author. He is also the former director of the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Librarian of Canada. The translator, Donald Winkler, has won the Governor General’s Award for French to English Translation three times. In this book, they have a winner.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall