My Weekly Book

Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith

This is the third installment of Alexander McCall Smith’s gentle and self-referential love affair with Edinburgh and its people - a romance he is also quietly carrying on in the pages of the Isabel Dalhousie novels. And, like the others, it is amusing, poignant, pensive, occasionally hilarious and inexpressibly sad by turns.

Our cast of characters has shifted and developed: Bruce Anderson is continuing his brilliant career in London and is (thankfully, I thought) absent from these pages. Pat MacGregor is starting a new life as a student while her boss, diffident gallery owner Matthew, has been reborn as a millionaire and is having to come to terms with his changed status and the way people react to it. Big Lou, coffee shop doyenne and dispenser of wisdom, is adapting to life with her long-lost American lover Eddie back on the scene while child prodigy Bertie is coping with the strain of having his teenage years visited upon him by his pushy mother while he is still only six. Domenica Macdonald is in the field, doing risky anthropological research on piracy in the Malacca Straits. Will she return unscathed? Angus Lordie is certainly hoping so, although it’s questionable whether his gold-toothed dog Cyril gives a damn…

Something that interests me greatly about McCall Smith’s writing style is the way it is episodic, in the moment and quite disrespectful of narrative conventions in some places. Aspects of the story that might, under other circumstances have been developed into major narrative threads fall by the wayside at the expense of other storylines. Narratives don’t start and end within the covers of one book, and things that the characters become greatly exercised about turn out to have been mere storms in teacups. Just like real life, actually.

This is undoubtedly due to the fact that these lovely books are written as proper series novels and published by installments in The Scotsman newspaper. They were, according to an introduction written by McCall Smith for the first volume, inspired by a conversation at a party with none other than the Tales of the City writer Armistead Maupin. Tales of the City was famously published in this way in a San Francisco paper and McCall Smith claims them as a direct inspiration. Certainly this method gives his tales an immediacy, a verisimilitude and a marvellous excuse to drop in cameos of Edinburgh’s great and good as they go about their everyday lives.

I understand that volume four is currently being serialised, I hope I am right and that the author goes on with it for as long as he continues to find it so entertaining.

Some links:

• The Scotsman: Love Over Scotland
• Author’s website: 44 Scotland Street series
• Love Reading: Love Over Scotland
• Random House: Love Over Scotland
• My Weekly Book: photographs of Scotland Street

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 3:12 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.