Dunedin readers will be especially enchanted as the setting of the novel is Edinburgh, with its constant reminder of street names that cosy up to each other in a familiar way emphasising Dunedin's relationship to the Scottish capital city, the sharing of our cultural antecedents and common history.
The Scotland Street novels are different from McCall Smith's other novel and story series in that each chapter is first serialised on a daily basis in the Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman. As a consequence, the chapters are short, about 1100 words each. They follow each other in the book in what may sometimes seem an eccentric order, as the end of the novel is obviously not always clear to the writer at the beginning. Indeed, the novel doesn't really have an end, but is a series of chapters always finding their way towards some concluding point.
Our guide through this labyrinth of chapters in this book is Bertie Pollock, a calm and thoughtful 6-year-old on the threshold of his 7th birthday. He is somewhat frustrated by the parenting of his overcontrolling mother, a keen disciple of Melanie Klein. His father Stuart, on the other hand, seems somewhat apprehensive of his wife's planning of his son's daily life - what he can eat, what toys he can play with, the sort of ideas he should hold. But Stuart does nothing about it until, late in the novel, Bertie's mother, through a series of circumstances, finds herself unable to return home for some time, and Bertie and his father are able to commence a quite different life now that the yoke of political and social correctness has been removed, albeit temporarily, from the household.
What is of interest here is that though McCall Smith is concerned with moral questions in all his books, seeking to set a tone of reasonableness, of kindness and tolerance in his fictional universe, in this book he often paints his female characters in unflattering colours, giving all the rebarbative characteristics to women, whilst being benign in his treatment of the somewhat less effectual menfolk.
Despite this bias, the book describes a charming series of encounters among the middle-class group of familiar characters who inhabit 44 Scotland Street and its neighbourhood, each chapter seeing events through a different pair of eyes and minds, but with Bertie appearing the wisest, the most inquisitive and most tolerant of them all. Yet there is something in Bertie that hints at the future rebel: he more than once dreams of running off, when he reaches the age of 18, to live in Glasgow, a city where real life can be lived away from the smothering of his mother and the perhaps too cosy Edinburgh.
- Peter Stupples teaches at the Dunedin School of Art.
Win a copy
The Otago Daily Times has five copies of Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers, by Alexander McCall Smith (RRP $39.99), to give away courtesy of Polygon Books and its distributor NewSouth Books. To go in the draw to win a copy, email helen.speirs@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email and ''Bertie Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, October 1. Winners will be notified.
