Alexander McCall Smith: The Full Cupboard Of Life

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Armed with a traditionally shaped, bush-tea drinking lady detective from Botswana, Mma Precious Ramotswe, Alexander McCall Smith has made a successful, if surprising, inroad into our bestseller lists. His The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, first in a series of the same name, has been on the international fiction list for a month, and goodness knows what will happen now that the other four books in the series are available - Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Kalahari Typing School for Men - and the final one, The Full Cupboard of Life, out this week.

Why surprising? Because McCall Smith's books are not quite like any others, and certainly buck almost every literary fashion that's going. They're quietly thoughtful, comically understated, and contain no sex or violence, unless you count, in the new series, a sausage dog's hilarious triple amputation. In short, they are easily digested, polite pleasures that, vaguely Wodehouse-like, seem to hail from a different age, but in fact simply give a different window on our own.

Two things drive them. One is McCall Smith's achingly endearing characters, wise, intuitive Mma Ramotswe and, in the new series, vulnerable, pompous Professor von Igelfeld. The other is his wonderful sense of place - of Botswana with its blue skies and tussle between old and new ways, and the rarified, insecure world of German academia.

McCall Smith himself is a most unusual character - a 55-year-old cult author and professor of medical law from Edinburgh, an international authority on genetics. He grew up in Zimbabwe before moving to Scotland to study, and has also worked on the criminal law of Botswana and helped to set up that country's university law faculty.

Unusually for a British author, his books first took off in the United States, where Mma Ramotswe and co have been on the New York Times bestseller list for months. Now, however, they are very much on the up in Britain as well, and The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency is currently being turned into a television series by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient).

In the first book, Mma Ramotswe sells the cattle her father left her, to set up a detective agency, becoming Botswana's first female private eye. Her clients are the ordinary people of Botswana and the matters to be investigated are not so much crimes as the ordinary problems of existence.

In The Full Cupboard of Life, the owner of Botswana's most successful hairdressing salon wants Mma Ramotswe to investigate four potential suitors to be sure they are not after her money. At the same time, Mma Ramotswe's own fiance, a talented and scrupulous motor mechanic to whom she has been engaged since the end of the first book, seems to be avoiding taking the plunge.

McCall Smith's new trilogy introduces us to the unusually tall and distinguished Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, author of a seminal work on Romance philology, Portuguese Irregular Verbs. He is ensconced in the Institute of Romance Philology at Regensburg along with two other tall Germans, his friends and rivals Professors Unterholzer and Prinzel. This triangle of relationships is at the heart of many of the short episodes (tall stories) that together make up these three slim yet stylish books.

Obsessed with the rituals of politeness, von Igelfeld has many awkward moments and rather agonising interior quandaries over his interface with everyone from other academics, to his friend Unterholzer's sausage dog.

After 15 years of daily contact, Unterholzer accidentally lets slip von Igelfeld's Christian name. "I'm so sorry," he expostulates, "I didn't mean to call you that. It was the emotion of the occasion ... "

McCall Smith gently yet devastatingly pillories academics and most forms of propriety as he amusingly reveals the competitiveness of that world. This rivalry overrides friendship, born of a melange of vanity and insecurity, self-righteousness and yet a kind of humbleness that will do anything to avoid social embarrassment.

In von Igelfeld's case, this extends to giving a lecture to a meeting of American vets after he has been mistaken for a world expert on sausage dogs, too mortified to alert his hosts to the mistake.

However, von Igelfeld's biggest social gaffe comes in The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs when he snaps at an overly talkative man in the Vatican Library, only to later discover it was the Pope. McCall Smith's wry heresy is nowhere more evident than in the ensuing meeting between von Igelfeld and His Holiness. The Pope is revealed as lonely and bored, a solitaire addict who sighs as he reminisces about his boyhood home.

These are mild tales, lacking in the gritty social realism we are more used to. They sail awfully close to Mr Bean-type corn, but are rescued by their emotional acuity and unexpected little twists of plot that lead either in the direction of humour or philosophy. Charming.

Polygon, $34.95

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Addenda and canvas have 10 sets of Alexander McCall Smith's Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainment series to give away. Just write your name and address on the back of an envelope and send it to: canvas, McCall giveaway, PO Box 3290, Auckland.