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The Sunday Philosophy Club
The mystery is kicked off when Isabel Dalhousie sees a young man, Mark Fraser, fall to his death, and her first thought is of W.H. Auden’s poem on the fall of Icarus. "Such events, said Auden, occur against a background of people going about their ordinary business." She feels morally bound to investigate his death since while on his way down the young man’s eyes had rested on her and as such she was his last human contact on earth. She tells her beloved niece: "He must have seen me. And I saw him. In my view that creates a moral bond between us." When her niece accuses her of sounding like the Review of Applied Ethics , a philosophical journal edited by Isabel, her pert response is, "I am the Review of Applied Ethics ." Isabel lives in a moral world. She even divides papers into moral categories: the ‘lower papers’ and the ‘morally serious papers’. Much of the narrative is propelled forward by Isabel’s musings. Most of her waking moments are taken up by a lavish meditation on manners and etiquette. Even when she takes a bus ride and spots her co-passengers, she can’t help but dwell on their being microcosm of our condition." She can’t stop herself from her reflections on moral imagination because "she was tuned into a different station from most people and the tuning dial was broken." She dwells at great length on phone etiquette: "A call before eight in the morning was an emergency; between eight and nine it was an intrusion; thereafter calls could be made till ten in the evening, although anything after nine-thirty required an apology for the disturbance. After 10 one was into emergency time again." The Sunday Philosophy Club is for all intents and purposes a detective novel but can easily fit the bill as a novel of manners or a philosophical novel. It is a book that opens your mind, broadens it and then stays there as a screen saver to enrich it. There is very little detection to speak of. The main mystery gets pushed to the background as various subplots engage your attention. What leaps off the pages is the sparkling banter between a boisterous set of characters and Isabel’s monologues with her self. McCall Smith has packed the pages with marvelous one-liners like "Happiness came upon you like the weather, determined by your personality" and "Cooking in a temper required caution with the pepper." The denouement occurs so gently and is written so skilfully that you are left a little surprised. Even more astonishing is Isabel’s reaction on coming face to face with the man responsible for Mark Fraser’s death. The author’s prose has considerable style, grace and intelligence. But this is no fast-paced thriller. If you are looking for murder, intrigue, passion and deceit, this is not the book to pick up. Rather, this page-turner has been crafted for the erudite reader with finely honed literary sensibilities. McCall Smith has written engagingly from a woman’s perspective. He writes, "Women were so much more natural in their friendships. Men were so different: they kept their friends at arm’s length and never admitted their feelings for them. How arid it must be to be a man; how constrained; what a whole world of emotion, and sympathy, they must lack; like living in the desert." His sharp observations about human nature have a certain warmth that makes you savour every word. The book is like a delightful companion and one finishes reading it with the thought of going back to it again soon, very soon. |
THE bestselling author of The
No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series is back with a brand-new series.
Alexander McCall Smith has created a charmingly sophisticated sleuth in The
Sunday Philosophy Club. Isabel Dalhousie promises to be as enduring
a character as the much-loved Precious Ramotswe of his earlier series.
This time, he has Edinburgh as a richly textured backdrop.