Wind and rain and cloud-scudded skies Alexander McCall Smith (2010)
The Charming Quirks of Others. London, Little Brown, Softcover edition, 246 pages, P218. ISBN 978-1-4087-0257-4. Available at Exclusive Books, Riverwalk.

Book Review
*SHERIDAN GRISWOLD | Friday October 29, 2010 00:00

Our heroine remains Isabel Dalhousie. Her son Charlie is now two. He is beginning to talk more, but by and large his life moves from one joy, visual, aural and oral, to the next. He knows he is loved by his mother Isabel, and his father Jamie - who happens to be younger than his mother by 14 years. His frequent visits to various locations in Edinburgh where he can observe his favourite birds help to keep him happy as do his sighting in the backyard of 'Fo' or Reynard the Fox. Charlie has not yet entered the 'terrible twos'.

You must wait for Number 8 of the serial on the No 2 Ladies' Detective for that. Charlie's caregiver is Grace, whom Charlie also loves. Grace has some unusual interests, including spiritualism that may help to divert Charlie's mother? Charlie has already started to 'hit' and his mother is disturbed to find that Grace had let him hit her. He needs to learn right from wrong. How is this accomplished when different people send out different signals to a child?

Isabel Dalhousie is not really a detective. She is a philosopher. But if you know any philosophers, perhaps you have found that they are good at solving problems. Thus other people turn to them for help. This is also Isabel Dalhousie's fate. She hasn't learnt to say no. She is troubled both by scruples and hunches. Both of these can undermine her abilities as a sleuth.

As editor of the highly respected academic journal, Review of Applied Ethics Isabel Dalhousie has a lot on her desk to keep her busy. She lives in a different world when she is at work. The Sunday Philosophy Club Series volume six also treats the conundrums accompanying the changing opinions of Professor Lettuce and his colleague Professor Christopher Dove, who are back again, thank goodness at a distance in number seven, but still sufficiently present to preoccupy our editor. The ticklish ins-and-outs of editing a journal are well captured in this novel.

Isabel Dalhousie is always able to find time for her niece Cat, always willing to help out with Eddie at her delicatessen - and has the ability to try to accommodate Cat's shifting boyfriends. She detested the last one, Bruno, who was a tightrope walker. Now Cat is being courted by a new boyfriend, whose path will unexpectedly cross an investigative task that Isabel Dalhousie takes on for the wife of the head of a local private school. She can debate with Jamie as to who is the worst among Cat's boyfriends, but must be careful not to be hoisted on her own petard - an occupational hazard not unique to philosophers.

Jamie and Isabel Dalhousie, who already share a son, agree to get married - sooner rather than later. She had been married before, briefly, to John Liamor, and needed to tread gently. Our sleuth encounters a disturbing challenge to how she deals with information when she is confronted with the accidental discovery that Jamie has been to a movie with Prue, a cellist in his orchestra, and to Prue's flat in Edinburgh, and he had never told her about these excursions. Why had he kept them secret, and what did they add up to against their commitment to get married? Prue, it turns out, is good at moral blackmail, telling men that she is soon to die, but doesn't want to part this world without knowing what it is like to be loved by a man.  Our No 2 Ladies' Detective is approached by Jillian Mackinlay, whose husband is the chairperson of the board of governors of Bishop Forbes, an elite boys' private school nearby.  Harold Slade, the incumbent principal, has taken a position in Singapore, and the search for a new head has narrowed down to three people. An anonymous poison pen letter in green ink has been received implying that one of the candidates is unsuitable for the position, but fails to name the person. Jillian says: 'We need somebody like you -somebody who knows her way about Edinburgh, who understands the issues. You'd never be suspect. And I have done my homework on you - you have a reputation, you know, for helping people' (page 45).

Three short-listed candidates: Gordon Leafers (Cat's new man), John Fraser (known indirectly to Grace); and Tom Simpson. Does Tom have a Masters degree? Is John Fraser guilty of a culpable homicide that has been covered up? Does Gordon Leafers have a secret life he wishes to hide from others? Or is the request that Isabel Dalhousie investigate the anonymous letter really just a smokescreen for a totally different moral dilemma? 

Isabel enjoys a dinner at Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott. Alex Mackinlay, as board chair for Bishop Forbes, is there to discuss with her the case of the green inked letter and its implications. At the dinner she is positioned next to Slade, the outgoing head of the school. Living in Scotland also has its quirks. Among them are Scots' love of their mountains and their desire to climb all the Munros (mountains over 3,000 feet). In a Mountaineering Club, 'What were the limits of trust in everyday life?' The ethics of mountaineering has not yet caught up to cave scuba diving where the buddy system has been abolished and it is now every person on their own - this way only one person may die instead of a diver killing a buddy for their air. In mountaineering it is who has the right to cut the rope and when?  The ruminations in this novel of a philosopher on human rights versus community rights (sounds a bit like the dilemma now being faced in Kgatleng District or the International Court of Justice as they deal with cases of genocide in Africa) are fascinating. Rights need to be recognised, but so does 'the practices of courtesy - everything, really, that made for peaceable relations between people' (page 178). Through the novel runs an old painting that is up for auction, one by Raeburn of 'Portrait of Mrs Alexander and her Granddaughter'. Because of the ties that bind Isabel, Dalhousie would like to own it. How can this be brought about while consistently doing the right thing?

As with the 11 Ladies' Detective novels - and now three more promised - are really about Botswana and Gaborone, the Sunday Philosophy Club Series is grounded in a love of Scotland and its Queen city, Edinburgh. 'Edinburgh was the same as anywhere else, and had the same range of people as others did: the good, the bad, the morally indifferent. They had their quirks, of course' (page 88).

Currently McCall Smith has been on circuit sponsored by Common Good Books. For P130 in person at the Scott Fitzgerald Theatre in Saint Paul, Minnesota, you could have watched and listened to Garrison Keillor interview the author on The Charming Quirks of Others. If you were there, perhaps you would have asked him why there are no chapter headings? You might also have asked him why he has a passion for the works of W. H. Auden, including Age of Anxiety (1947), a craving he inflicts on some of his characters in a number of his different serials. e-mail sheridangriswold@yahoo.com