My Weekly Book

Espresso Tales - Alexander McCall Smith

I had flu for much of March which meant my consumption of relatively undemanding books went through the roof. I’m going to Edinburgh in April which means my consumption of books about that city was similarly high. How kind of Alexander McCall Smith, then, to provide me with both in one neat, easy-to-read package…

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Espresso Tales is the middle volume in the trilogy-so-far of the author’s 44 Scotland Street series based on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and written in instalments for The Scotsman newspaper. In it we follow the fortunes of several residents of the flats at the eponymous address, people whose acquaintance we made in the first volume. Thus we watch six-year-old prodigy Bertie’s progress in his quest to shed his pink dungarees and yoga classes and become a normal little boy, here played out through a bonding moment with his father as they set out to solve the mystery of where the family Volvo is parked.

We wait with baited breath for the self-righteous Bruce Anderson, disgraced surveyor and wine merchant manqué, to fall on his well-proportioned arse and we watch Pat MacGregor learn the hard way that no good-looking single man ever comes without baggage of one sort or another. We follow Domenica MacDonald in her quest for a satisfying new area of anthropological research and catch up with many of our favourite non-residents including portraitist and failed art restorer Angus Lordie (never without his dog Cyril, naturally), Matthew the gallery owner and Pat’s employer, Big Lou the coffee shop proprietor, Ramsey Dumbarton, Tory stalwart and the author of some truly scintillating memoirs that we are privileged to catch a glimpse of, and the conflicted child psychotherapist Dr Fairbairn.

I think this series works on all sorts of levels: as an experiment in writing serial novels, as what The Scotsman describes as “a send-up by an insider, revealing the everyday lives of characters in a literary soap opera,” as homage to Tales of the City and as sheer enjoyment. Each volume is finished in a way that suggests the author intends it to be the last but as far as I know he hasn’t been able to stop writing them yet and I believe a fourth is now on the way. This book is an easy read but not one that lets the reader off too lightly - an important distinction. I will certainly be buying the next instalment as soon as it comes out in paperback.

Some links:

• The Scotsman review
• A fourth volume?
• Author’s website: Espresso Tales
• My Weekly Book review of 44 Scotland Street
• My Weekly Book review of Tales of the City
• The Joy of Google (ie completely unrelated but rather interesting in its own right): Espresso Stories

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 1:13 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.