REVIEW : Ladies’ detective ponders Shoes, Happiness
Posted on Sunday, July 16, 2006
Blue Shoes and Happiness, by Alexander McCall Smith, Pantheon, 240 pages, $ 21. 95.
Charming, endearing, nuanced simple, life-affirming … Alexander McCall Smith’s popular No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series inspires accolades of the “quiet” variety. The mysteries, or “ostensible mysteries,” as a Seattle Times reviewer labeled them, are set in Botswana, Africa, and revolve around the intrigues of Detective Precious Ramotswe. In the latest installment, Blue Shoes and Happiness, we find our heroine pondering, as usual, the right and wrong way to do things as she touts the old Botswana traditions over modern attitudes.
She likes — no, lives by — her bush tea. She is comfortable with her “traditional” (i. e. large ) build, and she even pities modern women, with their skinny arms. Smith has fun with Mma Ramotswe’s stature, putting the ultradignified and generally unflappable detective in situations made awkward by her size, which we gather has been on the increase since the last book.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series doesn’t rely on international intrigue, amazing plot twists, or controversial theories. Instead, the reader is brought in and out of the characters ’ thoughts and invited to ponder the mysteries of human nature and good conduct as Mma Ramotswe investigates the garden-variety domestic and professional issues of her clients.
Blue Shoes is in many ways at the opposite end of a spectrum from thrillers or mysteries like The Da Vinci Code. I was recently talking about the Code with a friend (we’d both just read it ). “This woman,” she said, “this French woman, how could she be such a prude over the scene she walked in on with her grandfather ? She’d quit speaking to her grandfather for all those years over that ? What a prude ! A French woman ?” I’d been thinking the same thing and was glad to hear someone else balk at this Code character enslaved by plot. I’ll take character development, voice, humor if I can get it, and theme over plot any day. Maybe it’s inevitable that the characters in a book like The Da Vinci Code lack depth or consistency, given that their behavior is so constrained by everything they have to do, and maybe that’s why I like Smith’s ostensible mysteries so much.
Smith’s intimacy with his characters is enhanced by the gentle, ironic distance the narrator keeps from them. The effect is so very charming that charm alone nearly carries Blue Shoes, and this is only one of the book’s quietly wonderful attributes that include Smith’s brief, well-timed and lovely descriptions of the African landscape, filtered through Mma Ramotswe’s love of her homeland. These descriptions are nothing like the tiresome diatribes that begin to feel like so much filler in some novels. Waxing poetic about the land can be gratuitous, not to mention boring, if it doesn’t mean anything in the larger context of the book. Smith’s does. And his voice is so beautiful that the language of music is needed to describe it: add “lyrical” and “euphonious” to that long list of accolades.
A LITTLE AIMLESS All the elements of a novel, working together in harmony, would be perfection, but Blue Shoes doesn’t quite reach it. Many readers will find that Smith has gone too far toward plotlessness. His wonderful characters actually do close to nothing, an issue that wouldn’t matter as much if the book’s suspects were more present and compelling. But the villains barely show up, and Smith’s focus never strays too far from Mma Ramotswe’s good manners, wit and harmless idiosyncrasies. Here’s a typical example of Smith’s main character shining in a conversation with a rude man “Neil reached for the tea-pot and poured tea for his guests. ‘You know, Mma Ramotswe, there’s something I want to talk to you about. I wasn’t going to mention it to you, but since you’re here, you might be just the person to deal with something. I know that you’re a … what do you call yourself, a detective ?’ ‘Yes, Rra,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘ I call myself a detective. And other people call me that too. ’” What it means to be a “lady,” which Mma Ramotswe and most of the other female characters in Blue Shoes absolutely consider themselves, preoccupies Smith. And his ladies are traditional, no matter their size: They are indirect they are understated; they are manipulative when necessary.
“She had a profound understanding of how men worked and what their weaknesses were,” Mma Ramotswe thinks of one of her friends. “That was the secret of so many successful women — they knew about the weaknesses of men.” SOMEWHAT DEFERENTIAL Even though Mma Ramotswe makes it clear she wouldn’t put up with a philandering, lazy or mean man — and she often sees these men and the women who love them in her line of work — she is still somewhat deferential in a very female way, and the sensibility of the novel is that this deference is a good and admirable thing. Let’s all please avoid reactionary politicizing of fictional characters, but some readers may have a few “ouch” moments with the sexual issues in Blue Shoes. Smith also seems to be increasing the social awareness of the series with frequent mentions of AIDS and how it has affected the area, surely a previous omission in books touted for their ability to describe a world so convincingly. But the mentions do little other than to bring up the issue and let it drop; Mma Ramotswe and company rarely run into anyone with the disease.
The attempted social consciousness, the running “traditional build” humor, the importance of shoes to Mma Ramotswe’s assistant and Mma Ramotswe’s considerations about going on a diet — these become themes and character traits trying to serve as plot, almost the reverse problem of the unbelievable French woman in Code.
In the end, Blue Shoes lacks a satisfying denouement, a problem that becomes inevitable about halfway through the book, when the rambling story lines are still showing no signs of coalescing. Smith’s writing is so good that anything he produces is probably worth reading, but next time out, I hope he joins more story to his talent for language, a talent so pronounced that his words stick in your head like a tune for a while, singing with the possibilities of perfection. Melissa King lives in Fayetteville.
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