My Weekly Book

Blue Shoes and Happiness - Alexander McCall Smith

It’s times like this when I begin to seriously doubt my own judgement. Because, you see, I have read this seventh instalment of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency saga, given a frown of puzzlement and then gone off to see what other people thought. And everywhere that I travel in this quest I find statements like these: another delightful instalment in this series; more astute insights into human nature by the author; another lovely relaxing, escapist read. My difficulty is that this is not how I saw it at all (plot details are potentially revealed from this point onwards).

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There’s a thread of sadness and poignancy running through this book that I simply don’t remember being present in the other volumes even though serious issues were never far under the surface. Mma Precious Ramotswe, the eponymous lady detective, does not seem to be in a good way and I feel almost as concerned about her as I would about a real-life friend. For a start I do not feel optimistic about the state of her marriage to garage owner and honourable mechanic Mr JLB Maketoni. The two of them appear more like business partners than a married couple, largely because on only one occasion do we see them in a private setting – with their adopted children present. (Though I am certainly not the first person to comment on the curiously sexless nature of all the major characters in this series, I have to admit with embarrassment that I can’t remember who it actually was.) They certainly appear to have a very, very distant relationship for a married couple.

Secondly, Mma Ramotswe is constantly looking backwards into the past rather than dealing with pressing things in the present or anticipating the future. She mourns for those people close to her who have died on almost every other page and constantly frets about the ill-effects of modernity and the loss of ‘traditional values’ from Botswana. She meets a dying American woman taking a last trip while her strength remains, and bursts into tears. Then there’s the fact that she’s become concerned about her weight. The joke about ‘a traditionally-built lady’ has finally started to go sour with everyone around her privately remarking that she’s now so traditional (or fat, if you appreciate straightforward language) that she’s breaking furniture, watching her skirts rip before her very eyes and ruining her van’s suspension. We even learn that she’s suffering from high blood pressure. Her attitude to her weight, which has always been a positive piece of characterisation, has suddenly become negative.

And her relationship with her assistant Grace Makutsi seems incredibly strained. Now the two of them sit and snipe at each other over their tea while we are treated to glimpses of the internal viewpoint of both women which show their increasing impatience with each other. Mma Makutsi rolls her eyes if Mma Ramotswe mentions one of the sayings of the late President Seretse Khama, and Mma Ramotswe privately refers to her assistant as ‘Mma Ninety-Seven Per Cent.’ Mma Makutsi implies that her employer may need to go on a diet and Mma Ramotswe retaliates by questioning the wisdom of purchasing of a wildly impractical pair of blue shoes. To my mind these are not good signs.

Another problem, and one that seems to me to be positively a symptom of depression (even though this is traditionally the province of Mr JLB Matekoni) is the way Mma Ramotswe cannot keep her mind on the business of the detective agency for very long without slipping into a reverie about her dead father or imagining giving up town life to return to the country. And in this book a terrible admission is finally explicitly made. It is this, which comes at the beginning of chapter twelve:

If one pressed Mma Ramotswe on the point, really pressed, she would admit that very little happened in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Very little in general, that was: certainly there were spikes of activity, in which suddenly there would be several problems to be looked into at once. These, though, were the exception; normally the issues with which the agency was required to deal were very small ones, which were readily solved by Mma Ramotswe’s simple expedient of asking someone a direct question and getting a direct answer. It was all very well for Clovis Anderson to go on about the complexity of many investigations, and indeed the danger of at least some of them, but that was not really what life in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was like.

This seems to me to strike at the heart of the entire series in a really fundamental way. In this tale there are two or three mysteries to be solved – concerning the frightened staff of a game reserve, the behaviour of a doctor who won’t allow his nurse to take blood pressure readings and a blackmailer who takes on a corrupt government cook. But all three of them are side issues and some (I’m thinking the doctor in particular) are dispatched in an absolutely perfunctory way. When I reached the halfway point I had to go back and do a quick skim-read after working out that I could recall not a single event that had actually happened in the last hundred and twenty pages. I know that the detection element has never been the mainstay of this series but instead the framework on which it is hung, bringing the characters into contact with others and giving them a context for their musings and reflections and good works. But now this framework seems to be collapsing and leaving us with a narrative that feels practically like a parody of earlier volumes in the series. We are treated to an almost stream-of-conscious narrative reminiscent of the aged father of Phuti Radiphuti who, we are told, has a memory that is not what it used to be and who has a tendency to become extremely boring over dinner.

Reading this book I felt it could very well have been the last in the series and that the words that complete the book would have constituted an apt final farewell from Mma Ramotswe to her readers. I am wrong about this. The next book, due to be published this year, is called The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, a title that does nothing whatsoever to decrease my anxiety about Mma Ramotswe’s marriage. I find, upon soliciting opinions from other readers, that the book is actually a gentle, philosophical inquiry into human nature and into what’s truly important in life. I realise I should draw comfort from the fact that Mma Makutsi and Mma Ramotswe continue to have a happy relationship due to their forbearance and respect for each other and that Mma Ramotswe’s abandonment of her diet in the final pages is a reinforcement of the values we have always seen her standing for. I am glad that Alexander McCall Smith has returned to this series after quite a long diversion into 44 Scotland Street and the Isabel Dalhousie novels, which I feared he was finding more satisfying to write than his Botswana tales.

It’s just that I found it unfocused, a little directionless and terribly, terribly sad. And I am not so sure that I am actually wrong on this last point.

Some links:

• Random House book page
• The Alexander McCall Smith forum
• Wikipedia: author entry
• Wikipedia: Botswana
• Fantastic Fiction: author entry
• Blue Shoes and Happiness: The Guardian digested read (contains spoilers and sarcasm)
• The Guardian review
• The Guardian podcast: The author reads bits out loud

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.