Corduroy Mansions (Alexander McCall Smith) Chapters 1-25

Sometimes you read an author for the first time, not being very impressed with him/her, but willing to try another of their books on the off chance that you just happened to pick “the wrong one” to start with.  Sometimes the second book is just as bad as the first (for me, James Patterson … bye-bye, J.P.) but other times the second book is much better.  And maybe the third one is even better than the second.  For me, that was this author, Alexander McCall Smith.  The first book of his I read was The Sunday Philosophy Club, which was written well enough, but was constructed in a way I didn’t find all that interesting, though I had really expected to like it.  After that was The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, a big improvement, followed by 44 Scotland Street, which I enjoyed very much.  Corduroy Mansions is starting out in the same vein as 44 Scotland Street.

McCall Smith is a very different kind of writer.  Several kinds, in fact, as his several different series are written in different prose styles, especially the ones set in Africa, which are told as if by someone whose first language was an African language and who learned English later in life.  There is a lightness of style, a breezy urbanity to his writing that contrasts starkly with most of the current crop of Scottish mystery writers who have adopted a dark, foreboding style that some, including McCall Smith, have rather disparagingly labelled, “Tartan Noir.”  I like those books very much myself, but his style is a refreshing change of pace.

This story is constructed in short, uniform-length chapters – 100 chapters in 353 pages – that appear to have been written, as 44 Scotland Street was, for publication in weekly installments in a popular Scottish newspaper.  It has the feel of a serialized story, even down to the quick, almost soap-opera like skipping back and forth from one set of characters and events to another.  From a lesser author, this technique might drive one crazy, but here it drives the pace.  Each short chapter gives us a furtherance of one of the sub-plots as well as some kind of closure so that we don’t feel that our reading has been interrupted.  This is not an easy thing to accomplish, but McCall Smith does it masterfully.

The dialog often sparkles.  When a woman calmly tells another woman, a friend, that she knows she’s having an affair with her husband, ‘Jane…looked at Berthea appreciatively.  “You’re being very mature about this,” she said.  Berthea’s coffee was getting cold.  She lifted the cup to her lips and drained it.  “But that’s why he’s leaving me,” she said.  “Because I’m mature.”’

One loses count of the number of threads running through this narrative as it skips from scene to scene, but one of the most compelling threads is the relationship between Caroline and James.  Here we have the scenario of a young gay man beginning to wonder if he is “phasing” out of being gay into being straight.  Is the author trying to establish that gayness is a matter of “choice,” a “phase” that some people go through, or simply showing that this character is confused about his own sexuality?  The word “gay” never gets spoken aloud as these two early-twenties Londoners dance around the issue, but James feels comfortable talking about his “preferences” with Caroline and we get a good look at his doubts and their sources.  He seems to be hinting that Caroline might be his “type” after all, and she keeps vacillating between allowing herself to fall for this attractive young man or not giving in to a temptation that will probably lead to disaster.  The reader is thus driven to read on!

Next Week:  Chapters 26-50
Week 3:  Chapters 51-75
Week 4:  Chapters 76-100