Alexander McCall Smith's latest Scotland Street moves reader from laughter to contemplation
The Duke of Johannesburg visits, and suggests his godson, an apparently perfect candidate, for the post. After all, there are "bags of male au pairs" these days. When the exhausted parents learning the young man loves cooking, flower arranging and rugby, they engage him at once.
Meanwhile, Olive, Pansy and Tofu stir up gossip about the trouble between Bertie's parents. His friend Ranald tries to soothe him with the assurance that God will deliver Tofu's comeuppance, when he "eventually gets hold of him."
In moments of delicious whimsy, we catch glimpses of Scandinavian noir, plainclothes nuns, half-opened bills, cheese wars between flatmates, and the dreaded "Glasgow kiss." Over coffee, Domenica and her friend Dilly recall a terrifying moment in the Uffizi Gallery when their friend came down with Stendhal syndrome, a condition that "occurs when you're exposed to too much great art." Poor Antonia "was positively foaming at the mouth and had to be carted off to the hospital."
In a bookstore, Matthew has a terrifying but hilarious run-in with his former school teacher that causes him to hide under his desk. Fortunately, this is resolved when he learns that she too has read Fifty Shades of Grey. Elspeth, who has been too busy with her three toddlers to explore the garden of their new home, suddenly finds she "could go out into the garden and simply smell the roses, if they had any."
Side by side with the humour, this writer's tales express his compassionate wisdom. Waiting to have coffee with Bruce, Pat contemplates the onset of invisibility that accompanies aging. "She was now twenty-five, the point at which eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds start to look through one. Invisibility for the young, of course, is a quality that grows slowly: by thirty, one is beginning to grow fainter; by forty, one is starting to disappear; and by fifty the metaphorical hill has been crossed and one is simply no longer there."
As always, sober themes underpin this delightful story. Angus contemplates the ineluctable passage of time as he recalls a friend of his youth, who once told him that "'just as I get used to something, the future comes and takes it away.'" Domenica has a moment of illumination that dispels her doubts about having married Angus, and gives him "a kiss of peace."
Sitting before the Board who will assess his application for promotion in the Department of Statistics, Stuart experiences his own moment of truth, recognizing with inescapable clarity that the bureaucrats have "lost the ability to appreciate truth, so blinded were they with appearance." This stunning revelation implies action, and Stuart takes a step into the unknown. Over a solitary lunch, he confronts the fact that "he simply did not believe in the utterances that they made their employees chant: the mission statements, the virtue signaling, the gobbledygook. Why should everybody believe the same thing, sign up to the same ideology?"
Matthew and the Duke have a conversation about the current rise of incivility, and the Duke quotes Hamish Henderson, who "believed that we should treat one another with gentleness and love," and be careful not to "disfigure ourselves with hatred." We unleash the forces of incivility "at our peril," says the Duke. "Nobody is above it, and we are just as vulnerable as anybody else."
Creative Scotland has brought two Pygmies (now renamed Forest People) to visit the country, and anthropologist Domenica is asked to help host them. With Dilly's assistance, she prepares a lunch for the visitors. When they arrive, it transpires that they speak neither English, French nor Swahili. This leaves their hostess stumped for conversation as she seats the guests and gives them lemonade.
Then she recalls a word she learned from the Baka people of the Congo, and tells Dilly, "They had a word for the spirit of the forest in which they lived: Jengi." The visitors are electrified, their eyes shining as the man points out the window at the trees in Drummond Place, then gazes back at his hosts "with an ineffable sadness." As Domenica has already told her friend, "their forests are being cut down and they're being relegated to so-called settlements," where "The canopies above their heads will be concrete." And she wants to cry "for the loss of so many of the things that had made the world a richly-textured place: for community, and local culture, and the forests, and the people who lived in them; because now all that was going, swept away, consumed, cut down, taken away."
Glimmering behind these sober themes, the delightfully local atmosphere of Scotland is always visible. The Scottish team shuts out New Zealand in a celebrated rugby match, Angus Lordie hosts a party where he declaims a poem, and the Duke drives himself in his "Belgian" car, as his driver is "off somewhere speaking Gaelic."