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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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The
Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Mother Alexander
McCall Smith has resumed his Isabel Dalhousie series when her son Charlie is
three months old. In The
Careful Use of Compliments, Isabel continues to reflect on life, moral
choices, and relationships. Her love of Jamie grows deeper, and she is challenged
for leadership of the Review of Applied Ethics. Cat plays a big role, as does
Grace. While readers of the previous books in the series may enjoy this new
offering more than novices, this book stands on its own for readers who want
to sample these characters and their ongoing life stories. Here’s an excerpt,
from the beginning of Chapter 3, pp. 30-33: By the time Grace arrived at
the house the next morning, Isabel had bathed Charlie, given him his
breakfast bottle, and was standing in front of the drawing-room window,
encouraging him to look out over the garden. She was not sure how much he
saw, but she was convinced that he was interested and was gazing fixedly at
one of the rhododendrons. As she held Charlie before the window and rocked
him gently, Isabel saw Grace walking up the front path, although Grace did
not spot her. Grace had a newspaper tucked under her arm and was carrying the
white canvas tote bag that accompanied her to work each day. This bag was
often empty, and hung flaccid from Grace's arm, but on occasion it bulged
with tantalizing shapes that intrigued Isabel and that she wished she could
ask Grace about. She knew, though, that there was usually at least a book in
the bag, as Grace was a keen reader and had a sacrosanct lunch hour during
which she would sit in the kitchen, immersed in a novel from the Central
Library, a cup of tea getting steadily colder in front of her. Since
Charlie's arrival, the nature of Grace's job had changed. This change had
required no negotiation, with Grace assuming that Isabel would need help with
the baby and that naturally this would take priority over her normal, more
mundane duties of cleaning and ironing. "I'll look after him while
you're working," Grace had announced. "And also when you want to go
out. I like babies. So that's fine." The tone of her voice indicated
that there needed to be no further discussion. Isabel was happy with the new
understanding, but even had she not been, she would have hesitated to
contradict Grace. Although Isabel was nominally Grace's employer, Grace
regarded herself as still working for Isabel's father, who had died years
before and in whose service as housekeeper she had spent all her
working life. Either that, or she thought of herself as being employed in
some strange way by the house itself; which meant that her loyalty, and
source of instructions, was really some authority separate from and higher
than Isabel. The
practical consequences of this were that Grace occasionally announced that
something would be done because "that's what the house needs."
Isabel thought this a curious expression, which made her home sound rather
like a casino or an old-fashioned merchant bank—in both of which one might
hear the staff talking about the house. But for all its peculiarity,
"the arrangement worked very well and indeed was welcomed by Isabel as a
means of putting the relationship between herself and Grace on a more equal,
and therefore easier, footing. Isabel did not like the idea of being an
employer, with all that this entailed in terms of authority and power. If
Grace regarded herself as being employed by some vague metaphysical body
known as the house, then that at least enabled Isabel to treat her as a
mixture of friend and colleague, which is precisely how she viewed her
anyway. Of course the circumstances in
which the two women found themselves were different, and no amount of
linguistic sleight of hand could conceal that. Isabel had enjoyed every
advantage in education and upbringing; there had been money, travel, and,
ultimately, freedom from the constraints of an office job or its equivalents.
Grace, by contrast, had come from a home in which there had been no spare
money, little free time, and, in the background, the knowledge that
unemployment might at any time remove whatever small measure of prosperity
people might have attained. Grace went into the kitchen,
put the tote bag down on a chair, and made her way into the morning room. "I'm here," Isabel
called out. "In the study." Grace entered the room and
beamed at Charlie. "He's looking very bright and breezy," she
said, coming up to tickle Charlie under the chin. Charlie grinned and waved
his arms in the air-. "I think he wants to go to
you," said Isabel. Grace took Charlie in her arms.
"Of course he does," she said. It was not the words themselves,
Isabel realised—it was more the inflection. Did Grace mean that it was no
surprise that Charlie should want to go to her rather than stay with his
mother? That was how it sounded, even if Grace had not meant` it that way. "He actually quite likes
me too," said Isabel softly. Grace looked at her in
astonishment. "But of course he does," she said. "You're his
mother. All boys like their mothers." "No,"
said Isabel. "I don't think they do. Some mothers suffocate their sons,
emotionally. They don't mean to, but it happens." She looked out of the
window. She had seen it in her family, in a cousin whose ambitious mother had
nagged him until he had cut himself free and had as little as possible to do with
her. He had been civil, of course, but everybody had seen it—the stiff
posture, the formal politeness, the looking away when she spoke to him. But
had he loved her, in spite of this? She remembered him at his mother's
funeral when he had wept, quietly but voluminously, and Isabel, sitting in
the row behind him, had put her hand on his shoulder and whispered to him in
comfort. We leave it too late, she had thought; we always do, and then these
salutary lessons are learned at the graveside. "Mothers always mean
well," said Grace. "As long as they don't try to choose their son's
wife. That's a mistake." Charlie looked up at Grace and
smiled. I have enough, thought Isabel; I have so much that surely I can share
him. Grace turned towards Isabel.
Her face, Isabel noticed, seemed transformed by the close presence of the
baby, her look at that moment one of near pride. "Do you want to work
this morning?" she said, looking in the direction of Isabel's overcrowded
desk. "There's not much to do in the house. I could look after
Charlie." Isabel felt a wrench. Part of
her wanted to answer that she would decide for herself, in good time, whether
she wanted to work or whether she wished simply to be with Charlie; but
another part of her, the responsible part, felt she should deal with the pile
of correspondence that she had started to tackle the previous day but that
she had abandoned in favour of the auctioneer's catalogue. There were two
horses in the soul, she thought, as Socrates had said in Phaedrus—the one,
unruly, governed by passions, pulling in the direction of self-indulgence;
the other, restrained, dutiful, governed by a sense of shame. And Auden had
felt the same, she thought; he was a dualist who knew the struggle between
the dark and the light sides of the self, the struggle that all of us know to
a greater or lesser extent. There’s
a feeling of eavesdropping on the mind when reading these Dalhousie novels.
She’s a fascinating character and her thoughts are packed with insights. The
Careful Use of Compliments allows this cast of characters to continue to
grow and develop. Steve
Hopkins, November 20, 2007 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Careful Use of
Compliments.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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