Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith
		Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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	Responsibility While some fans of McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series may be disturbed by the distraction, a new franchise may be starting with Isabel Dalhousie, a woman of independent means who edits the Review of Applied Ethics and appears as the protagonist of his new novel, The Sunday Philosophy Club. An ensemble of quirky characters add to the pleasure of watching Isabel apply her ethics to the situations she experiences. She spends her life thinking about moral responsibility. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 4, pp. 36-43: Cooking in a temper required caution with the pepper; one might put far too much in and ruin a risotto in sheer pique. She felt dirtied by contact with McManus, as she inevitably did on those occasions when she found herself talking to somebody whose outlook on life was completely amoral. There were a surprising number of such people, she thought, and they were becoming more common; people to whom the idea of a moral sense seemed to be quite alien. What had appalled her most about McManus was the fact that he intended to talk to the parents, whose grief counted less for him than the desire of the public to witness the suffering of others. She shuddered. There was nobody, it seemed, to whom one might appeal; nobody who seemed prepared to say: Leave those poor people in peace. She stirred the risotto, taking a small spoonful to test it for seasoning. The liquid from the soaked porcini mushrooms had imparted its flavour to the rice, and it was perfect. Soon she could put the dish in the lower oven and leave it there until Cat and Toby sat down with her at the table. In the meantime, there was a salad to prepare and a bottle of wine to open. She felt calmer by the time the doorbell rang and she admitted her guests. The evening had turned cool, and Cat was wearing a full-length brown coat which Isabel had bought her for a birthday several years ago. She took this off and laid it down on a hail chair, revealing a long red dress underneath. Toby, who was a tail young man a year or two older than Cat, was wearing a dark brown tweed jacket and a roll-top shirt underneath. Isabel glanced at his trousers, which were crushed-strawberry corduroy; exactly what she would expect him to wear. He had never surprised her in that respect. I must try she thought. I have to try to like him. Cat had brought a plate of smoked salmon, which she took through to the kitchen with Isabel while Toby waited for them in the downstairs drawing room. “Are you feeling any better?” Cat asked. “You seemed so miserable this morning.” Isabel took the plate of fish from her niece and removed the protective covering of foil. “Yes,” she said. “I’m feeling much better.” She did not mention the journalist’s visit, partly because she wanted not to be thought to be dwelling on the subject and partly because she wanted to put it out of her mind. They laid out the salmon and returned to the drawing room. Toby was standing at the window, his hands clasped behind his back. Isabel offered her guests a drink, which she poured from the cabinet. When she handed his drink to Toby he raised it to her and gave the Gaelic toast. “Slaint,” said Toby. Isabel raised her glass weakly. Slaint, she was sure, would be Toby’s only word of Gaelic, and she did not like the peppering of one language with words from others; pas du tout. So she muttered, under her breath, “Brindisi.” “Brin what?” asked Toby. “Brindisi,” said Isabel. “The Italian toast.” Cat glanced at her. She hoped that Isabel would not be mischievous: she was perfectly capable of winding Toby up. “Isabel speaks quite good Italian,” Cat said. “Useful,” said Toby. “I’m no good at languages. A few words of French, I suppose, left over from school, and a bit of German. But nothing else.” Toby reached for a piece of brown bread and smoked salmon. “I can’t resist this stuff,” he said. “Cat gets it from somebody over in Argyll. Archie somebody, isn’t it, Cat?” “Archie MacKinnon,” said Cat. “He smokes it himself in his garden, in one of those old smoking sheds. He soaks it in rum and then puts it over oak chips. It’s the rum that gives it that wonderful flavour.” Toby reached for another of the largest pieces. Cat quickly picked up the plate and offered it to Isabel. “I go up and see Archie when I go to Campbelltown,” she said, placing the plate at Isabel’s side. “Archie is a wonderful old man. Eighty-something, but still going out in his boat. He has two dogs, Max and Morris.” “After the boys?” said Isabel. “Yes,” said Cat. Toby looked at the salmon. “What boys?” “Max and Morris,” said Isabel. “Two German boys. The very first comic-book characters. They got up to all sorts of mischief and were eventually chopped into pieces by a baker and made into biscuits.” She looked at Toby. Max and Morris had fallen into the baker’s flour vat and had been put into a mixing machine. The biscuits into which they had been made were eventually eaten by ducks. Such a Germanic idea, she thought; and for a moment she imagined that this might happen to Toby, tumbling into such a machine and being made into biscuits. “You’re smiling,” said Cat. “Not intentionally,” said Isabel hurriedly. Did one ever mean to smile? They talked for half an hour or so before the meal. Toby had been skiing with a group of friends and he talked about his offpiste adventures. There had been an awkward moment when they had caused a halfhearted avalanche, but they had managed to get out of trouble. “A rather close thing,” he said. “You know what an avalanche sounds like?” “Surf?” suggested Isabel. Toby shook his head. “Thunder,” he said. “Just like thunder. And it gets louder and louder.” Isabel imagined the scene—Toby in a strawberry-coloured ski suit with a tidal wave of snow hurtling down towards him, and the sun on the white peaks of the mountains. And then, just for a moment, she saw the snow overtake him and cover his flailing limbs in a churning of white, and then stillness, and there would be nothing but the tip of a ski pole to mark the spot. No, that was an unworthy thought, every bit as bad as imagining him being made into biscuits, and she put it out of her mind. But why had Cat not gone? She enjoyed skiing, but perhaps Toby had not invited her. “You didn’t want to go, Cat?” she asked. It was a potentially awkward question, but there was something in the self-assuredness of this young man that made her feel mischievous. Cat sighed. “The shop,” she said. “I can’t get away. I’d have loved to have gone. But I just couldn’t.” “What about Eddie?” said Toby. “Surely he’s old enough to look after things for a week or so. Can’t you trust him?” “Of course I can trust him,” Cat retorted. “It’s just that Eddie is a bit . . . vulnerable.” Toby looked sideways at her. He was sitting beside Cat on the sofa near the window and Isabel thought that she detected an incipient sneer. This was interesting. “Vulnerable?” Toby said. “Is that what you call it?” Cat looked down at her glass. Isabel watched Toby. There was a touch of cruelty in the face, she thought; just below the surface, below that well-scrubbed, slightly pink look. And the face was very slightly fleshy, she thought, and in ten years’ time his nose would begin to droop and. . . She stopped herself. She did not warm to him, but charity, the demands of which one should never forget, nudged at her gently. “He’s a nice boy,” Cat mumbled. “He’s had a hard time. And I can rely on him absolutely. He’s very nice.” “Of course he is,” said Toby. “Bit of a wimp, though, isn’t he? Just a bit. . . you know.” Isabel had been watching in discreet fascination, but now she felt that she would have to intervene. She did not want Cat embarrassed in this way, even if the prospect of scales tumbling from Cat’s eyes was an attractive one. What did she see in him? Was there anything at all, apart from the fact that he was a perfect specimen of a certain sort of thoughtless masculinity? The language of Cat’s generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting? Look at John Liamor. He could talk for hours and every bit of it was interesting. People would sit, more or less at his feet, and listen to him. What did it matter that he was thin and had that pale, almost translucent skin that went with a certain form of Celtic colouring? He was beautiful, in her eyes, and interesting, and now another woman, somebody whom she would never meet, somebody far away in California or wherever it was, had him for herself. Isabel had met him in Cambridge. She was at Newnham, in the last year of her philosophy degree. He was a research fellow, a few years older than her, a dark-haired Irishman, a graduate of University College Dublin, who had been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Clare College and was writing a book on Synge. He had rooms at the back of the college, looking out over the Fellows’ Garden on the other side of the river, and he invited Isabel to these rooms, where he sat and smoked, and looked at her. She was disconcerted by his gaze, and she wondered whether, in her absence, he talked as condescendingly—and wittily—of her as he did of others. John Liamor felt that most people in Cambridge were provincial—he came from Cork, originally, which presumably was anything but provincial. He despised the products of expensive English schools—”little Lord Fauntleroys”—and he sneered at the clerics who still peopled the college. “Reverend,” the title still borne by many dons in subjects as diverse as mathematics and classics, he changed to “Reversed,” which Isabel and others, without knowing quite why they should do so, found funny. The principal of his college, a mild man, an economic historian, who had never been anything but generous and accommodating to his Irish guest, he described as the “chief obscurantist.” John Liamor gathered about him a salon of acolytes. These were students who were as much attracted by his undoubted brilliance as by the whiff of sulphur which surrounded his ideas. It was the seventies, and the frothiness of the previous decade had subsided. What remained to believe in, or indeed to mock? Ambition and personal gain, those heady gods of the following decade, were in the wings, but not centre stage, which made a brooding Irishman with an iconoclastic talent an intriguing option. With John Liamor it was not essential to believe in anything; all that was required was the ability to mock. And that was where his real appeal lay; he could sneer at the sneerers themselves because he was Irish and they, for all their radicalism, were still English and therefore, in his view, irretrievably part of the whole apparatus of oppression. Isabel did not fit easily into this circle, and people remarked on the unlikely nature of the developing liaison. John Liamor’s detractors, in particular—and he was not popular in his college, nor in the philosophy department—found the relationship a strange one. These people resented Liamor’s intellectual condescension, and its trappings; he read French philosophy and peppered his remarks with references to Foucault. And, for one or two of them at least, those who really disliked him, there was something else: Liamor wasn’t English. “Our Irish friend and his Scottish friend,” one of the detractors remarked. “What an interesting, interesting couple. She’s thoughtful; she’s reasonable; she’s civil; he’s a jumped-up Brendan Behan. One expects him to break into song at any moment. You know the sort. I could have cried with pride at the way he died, and so on. Lots of anger about what we were meant to have done to them back years ago. That sort of thing.” At times she herself found it surprising that she was so attracted to him. It was almost as if there was nowhere else to go; that they were two people thrown together on a journey, who found themselves sharing the same railway compartment and becoming resigned to each other’s company. Others found a more prosaic explanation. “Sex,” observed one of Isabel’s friends. “It brings all sorts of people together, doesn’t it? Simple. They don’t have to like each other.” “The Pyrenees,” said Isabel suddenly. Both Toby and Cat stared at her. “Yes,” Isabel continued airily. “The Pyrenees. Do you know that I have never been to the Pyrenees? Not once.” “I have,” said Toby. “I haven’t,” said Cat. “But I would like to go.” “We could go together,” Isabel pressed on, adding, “and Toby, too, of course, if you wanted to come, Toby. We could all go climbing. Toby would lead the way and we would all be roped to him. We’d be so safe.” Cat laughed. “He’d slip, and then we’d all fall to our deaths. . .“ She stopped herself suddenly. The remark had come out without her thinking of it, and now she glanced at Isabel apologetically. The whole point of the evening was to take her aunt’s mind off what had happened in the Usher Hall. “The Andes,” Isabel said brightly. “Now, I have been to the Andes. And they’re just magnificent. But I could hardly breathe, you know, they are so high.” “I went to the Andes once,” Toby chipped in. “At university. Our climbing club went. One of the guys slipped and fell. Five hundred feet, if not more.” There was a silence. Toby looked into his glass, remembering. Cat studied the ceiling. Readers will find a few hours of engaging entertainment on the pages of The Sunday Philosophy Club. Steve Hopkins, August 25, 2005
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