What Book to Read?

The Sunday Philosophy Club (2004) is the first in a series of mystery stories featuring Isabel Dalhousie, citizen of Edinburgh and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. I heard McCall Smith speak at the Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas – not, as he noted, that his ideas were particularly dangerous – and he seemed a thoroughly nice man. This is just the sort of book such a person would write. If you are after thrills, look elsewhere.

Isabel is interested in moral philosophy. She can afford to indulge her taste – she is forty-two and single and lives comfortably in a large house with a house keeper in one of the better suburbs of Edinburgh. She is interested in art, particularly in Scottish artists, and in literature and music. One evening at a concert she sees a young man falling from the highest tier of seats to his death below. It’s not just curiosity that makes her want to know what happened. She thinks that she was probably the last person he saw, and that this ‘creates a moral bond’ between them. So she sets out to find out about him, and how and why he died.

The story is slight by any standards. Isabel meets various people who were connected to the young man or to the firm he worked for, but though she has various theories about what might have happened, she finds little proof of any of them. There is some suspense, but it is more of the ‘when is something going to happen’ kind than the page turning kind. The truth is revealed more or less by chance.  I guess intricate and fast moving plots are not what McCall Smith’s legion of readers are looking for.

Despite her feeling of ‘moral involvement’, Isabel does not use philosophical reasoning to solve the mystery.  She ponders questions of truth telling, the morality of lying, hypocrisy and trust, but when she finally decides what to do, ‘the decision was really quite simple, and she did not need to be a moral philosopher to take it’. There is also a sub plot in which she is concerned about the faithfulness of her niece’s boy friend; morally, she knows she should remain silent. But here too her concern about what she should do is overtaken by what she does:  ‘she had not meant to say it – she knew it was wrong – and yet it had come out’. This doesn’t invalidate her musings, but it does bear out her conclusion that ‘All the great issues were reducible to the simple facts of everyday human life’.

I haven’t made this sound very promising, yet I found it a very pleasant book to read. McCall Smith is interested here in the same issue as he spoke on at the Sydney Festival – the loss of ‘moral compass’ in modern society.  Isabel may not always live up to her philosophical ideals, but she is deeply concerned about moral issues and tries to live a moral life. She is kind and thoughtful, she respects other people’s feelings and she is completely trustworthy. She may be fighting a loosing battle against the modern tide – ‘the word conscience was not one which one heard very much anymore’ – but McCall Smith makes her an attractive character with whom most readers can identity.

McCall Smith also writes very fondly of Edinburgh, home of the Scottish Enlightenment, but also of ‘rigid hierarchies and the deep convictions of Scottish Presbyterianism’, of outward respectability and hidden vice – ‘The story of Jekyll and Hyde was conceived in Edinburgh, of course, and it made perfect sense there’.

 This book wasn’t greeted with the universal praise that McCall Smith received for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective series. Some critics though they were being lectured, and that Isabel lacked the force and energy of Precious Ramotswe. The New York Times concluded that the novel is ‘the literary equivalent of herbal tea and a cozy fire’. But what’s so wrong with that?

PS.  I have no idea why this book is called ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’. The club is mentioned, but doesn’t meet. Perhaps all readers are members of the club?

You can read more about Alexander McCall Smith and his books here.