44 Scotland Street: Alexander McCall Smith

“So this is the sort of thing one sees in London. It’s obviously a hotbed of adultery and goings on.”

A few years ago, I read a couple of novels in Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series; Recently I needed to step away from crime and pick up a soothing read and so I decided to start at the very beginning and immerse myself in this delightful, light-hearted series.

44 Scotland Street is a large house in Edinburgh broken up into flats. Some of the book’s characters live at this address, but the story spills over to include not only the residents, but their friends, their work mates, their social acquaintances and an assortment of other minor characters.

The story begins with Pat, a 22 year old woman who is taking her second gap year (there’s a bit of an untold story here). The story begins with her applying as a roommate to a flat occupied by good-looking narcissistic Bruce–a man who never passes up the opportunity to admire his reflection in a mirror. Other flat mates, Ian and Sarah are absent and off travelling. At first, Pat is wary of Bruce but soon falls into an infatuation with him–even though she is well aware that he is an egomaniac and will only make her unhappy. Another resident, anthropologist Domenica Macdonald, a woman in her fifties, recognises the signs of Pat’s infatuation with Bruce, gives her advice and befriends her. Domenica’s friendship is an alternative to Bruce’s toxic power over some women, and through Domenica, Pat meets painter Angus Lordie and his amazing winking, beer-drinking dog Cyril.

Other residents include 5-year-old Bertie, a child prodigy and his parents Irene and Stuart. Irene has extremely strong opinions, and while on one hand she supposedly is forward-thinking, encouraging Bertie, who plays the saxophone and is learning Italian, to not be bound by age-based educational norms, Irene won’t allow Bertie to have the slightest independence when it comes to play. She insists that his room be painted pink “to break sexist norms.” Bertie revolts by daubing graffiti all over the nursery school bathroom. When he’s expelled, Irene, an acolyte of the therapist Melanie Klein, takes Bertie to therapy, and the sections with the psychiatrist Dr. Hugo Fairbairn and his (Freudian) obsession with Bertie’s dream about a train going into a “forbidden tunnel” are hilarious–especially since Irene is clueless about Dr. Fairbairn’s implied interpretation. While Irene worships Dr. Fairbairn and mentally bathes in the post-session analyses, Bertie decides his therapist is quite mad.

Irene and Domenica can’t stand each other. Irene thinks Domenica has “intellectual pretensions, and a haughty manner” (she should look in the mirror) while the equally opinionated Domenica (correctly) thinks that Bertie should be allowed to have a normal childhood. To Domenica, Bertie is “nothing but a social experiment” thanks to his mother.

As the story unfolds, Pat finds a job at an art gallery run by the hapless Matthew. The art gallery is Matthew’s wealthy father’s latest attempt to launch his son into some sort of career. It looks as if the art gallery is going to be another failure, but then Pat suspects that one of the paintings may be valuable. Poor Pat is in thrall to Bruce, but Matthew, his polar opposite, makes a few attempts to see Pat outside of the work environment.

“You’re not a failure,” She said. You’re kind, you’re considerate, you’re …”

The taxi driver was watching. He’d heard what Matthew had said and now he witnessed Pat’s attempt to comfort him. This was not unusual in his experience. Men were in a mess these days. Virtually all of them. Women had destabilized them, made them uncertain about themselves, undermined their confidence. and then when the men fell to pieces, the women tried to put them together again but it was too late, the damage was done.

The taxi driver sighed. None of this applied to him. He went to his golf club two or three times a week. He was safe there. No women there. A refuge.

“I am certainly not a new man,” he thought, unlike that wimp in the back there. “Good god look at him. What a wimp!“

Bruce who is deeply in love with himself and who glances at his own vision of loveliness as often as he can, decides that he’s wasted as a chartered surveyor and with his usual arrogance sees himself flourishing as a bon vivant in the wine trade, but before he makes the career leap, he’s invited to a lacklustre Conservative party fundraiser by his boss, Todd. He’s been invited really for his boss’s daughter, Lizzie as Lizzie’s mother, Sasha, thinks her daughter needs a nudge towards getting a boyfriend. Bruce thinks he’s generous to attend, and considers paying “a bit of attention” to Lizzie as a form of “community service.” Listening to another attendee is boring but Bruce thinks:

One could afford to be generous about the boring when people found one so fascinating.

This is similar to Bruce’s attitude to Pat. He knows she is in thrall to him, but like a typical narcissist, always hungry for new supply, he callously fuels Pat’s worship. He is sleeping with an American girl, and Pat is painfully aware of this, but he constantly dangles himself (inappropriately) in front of her, and also offers, cheekily, to “share” the ‘Bruce wealth’ with Pat.

Another major character is Big Lou, a woman who has bad luck with men and who owns a cafe across the street from the gallery. She nursed a “demanding uncle” until his death. The cafe was once a second-hand bookshop, and she reads the old stock voraciously–always happy to explore various philosophical ideas with her customers.

In the introduction, the author explains how he wrote this as a serial in The Scotsman. The book is a love story to Edinburgh. It’s light, funny and refreshing, and yet it also contains a treasure trove of scenes regarding human behaviour. The book gave me a lot of laughter.