Corduroy Mansions (Alexander McCall Smith) Chapters 26-50

It continues to strike me as curious that, despite the soap opera construction and content of this book, it remains riveting to me.  As I mentioned previously, each thread follows a distinct situation involving only tenuously related characters and skips around in a seemingly random pattern from one situation to the next.  Usually this is a source of at least mild irritation to me, but somehow it doesn’t bother me here.  We have the William/Eddie/Marcia situation, where William acquires a dog, one “Freddie de la Hay,” in an attempt to get his son, Eddie, to move out.  Also, there's Caroline’s situation with James and the question of whether he is really gay after all.  There is the “Snark” situation, revolving around the MP (I Googled MP to find “Member of Parliament” – sorry, not British…) Oedipus Snark, his wife, Berthea and her New Age brother Terence. The Barbara Ragg connection with Snark could be considered separately.  The roommates Dee, Jo, Jenny and Caroline also connect with the other threads in a web all revolving more or less around the apartment house rather sardonically referred to as “Corduroy Mansions.”

Upon reading this synoptic analysis, it really does sound like a soap opera; the kind of book that I would normally not expect to enjoy very much.  Does its appeal reside entirely in the strength of a great writer’s prose?  The writing is very engaging, to be sure, but surely there is more to it than that.  Ayn Rand wrote of a “Sense of Life” that is imparted by any accomplished artist and how that Sense of Life either resonates in a meaningful way or not.  McCall Smith’s way of looking at the world inevitably permeates his writing, and the reader either responds to that or doesn’t.  At the other end of this spectrum would be a writer who prose might be rather stilted, sparse or austere, but who writes of such fascinating topics and events that we are captivated nevertheless.

William’s situation addresses a topic which has become increasingly common; that of a parent who’s twenty-something offspring are still living with them and show no signs of wanting to be on their own.  This is further complicated by Marcia’s schemes to snag him as a mate and the irony of her suggestion that he get a dog – which Eddie would hate – backfiring on her as the dog, Freddie de la Hay, begins to come between her and William, while Eddie decides that having a dog isn’t so bad after all.  Good, solid British humor here, if not exactly Monty Python material.

Berthea’s visit to her brother, Terence, backfires in a completely different way as his mechanical ineptitude practically blows him out of existence when he hooks up his decrepit car’s battery to a jerry-rigged extension cord connected to his house’s electricity, resulting in an ambulance ride to the hospital and a “near-death experience” complete with entering the tunnel and encountering the loved ones “on the other side” before being snatched back from death.  Here’s hoping for a further exploration of that topic!

Jenny’s being fired by Snark right after William has lost his key employee has the reader guessing what will happen next.  Will we be witnessing the complications that can arise when your boss lives in the apartment upstairs from you?  Our author seems to be, on one level, simply touching on many of the contemporary topics and issues that he finds interesting and showing them to the reader in a fresh light, with perhaps the merest hint of editorializing, while staying far away from any moralizing he may have been tempted to engage in.

 

 

 

Next Week:  Chapters 51-75
Week 4:  Chapters 76-100