Book review: The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine by Alexander McCall Smith

The thirteenth book I read in 2016 was The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine, the sixteenth book in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith.

I was a bit let down for the first time by the previous book in the series, and for a while I thought I was going to have a bone to pick with this one as well. The premise is that Mma Makutsi persuades Mma Ramotswe to take her first vacation from the business.  At loose ends and not knowing what to do with the time on her hands, Mma Ramotswe begins to suspect both that Mma Makutsi is plotting to take over the agency permanently and that she is badly botching the case under investigation.

Despite appearances, however, the friendship and mutual respect between the two women ends up stronger than ever.  During her vacation, Mma Ramotswe also runs afoul of a extorting street urchin, delivers him out the control of the guardian using him to collect pocket-change amounts of protection money to Mma Potokwane's orphan farm, and even manages to orchestrate a reunion with his sole surviving family member.

Book review: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming by Rod Dreher

The twelfth book I read in 2016 was The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher. Dreher is a journalist and critic whose talent and ambition took him far away from the small Louisiana town where he grew up.  As he moved from success to success, he paid occasional visits back home to his family and was reasonably justified in feeling that he was the prodigy, the fortunate son, the success, while his sister "settled" for an ordinary life as a schoolteacher, wife, and mother.  Then his sister, Ruthie Leming, was diagnosed with cancer.

What do you want me to say?  She dies.  The sister dies.  This isn't a spoiler; you know this from the time you pick up the book and read the back cover.  There's no suspense about it.  If you want to read a book about someone fighting a losing battle, from the time she's blindsided with the diagnosis to the moment when the tumor abruptly severs an artery and she bleeds out in her husband's arms, this is your book, though, frankly, if that were all this was, I'd question your mental health for wanting to.

But the book isn't just about Ruthie's struggle; much more it's about her community rallying around her to support her family, a community that her cosmopolitan brother has spent most of his life looking down on, if benevolently.  It makes his question his own choices in life: to remain rootless, chasing the brass ring of success.  If it were he, or his wife or children, seriously ill, he realizes he hasn't made the intimate connections Ruthie had that enclosed her family in a web of love and care.

But the book isn't just a Hallmark card to small towns, either.  All the time Rod has been implicitly judging his sister for taking the easy road, for having no ambition and failing to dream big, he discovers that Ruthie has likewise been judging him: as an egghead intellectual who thinks he's better than his relatives back home.  One of the most heartbreaking realizations in the book is when , after Rod believes he and Ruthie have cleared the air and buried the hatchet before her death, he realizes that she has continued to denigrate him behind his back to her children.

Rod moves home, partly to help take care of Ruthie's daughters, but equally as much to try to repair his strained relationships with his family and to try to gain for his own wife and children the sense of belonging and community which supported Ruthie's family in their time of crisis.  This is not an easy fix or a guaranteed happy ending.  But a moment when Rod's sense that his father sees him as a failure for leaving is revealed as a result of his father's own guilt over not breaking away from a toxic family situation is breathtaking.

Book review: The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe by Alexander McCall Smith

The eleventh book I read in 2016 was The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe, the fifteenth installment in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith.  This was the first of the Mma Ramotswe books that I felt fell a little flat.

The titular cafe is an ill-considered business venture by Mma Makutsi, in which she is thoroughly taken advantage of and played the fool.  The A-plot involves a woman who claims to be an amnesiac and whose identity Mma Ramotswe is hired to discover.  And the side-plot involves both Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe not having enough money to keep all the recurring characters employed.

For one thing, at this point in the series, I don't like seeing beloved characters struggling.  A story about Speedy Motors or the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency going out of business is not one I'm interested in reading.  It's been a given that the detective agency is bumping along basically breaking even, but Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors has always been portrayed as a going concern.  And I felt bad enough for Grace Makutsi back before her marriage when the glamorous and expensive headboard purchased for her marriage bed was ruined because her tiny apartment was too small to hold it; dashing her hopes and ambitions again is too cruel.

For another thing, all of the plots are solved, not by Mma Ramotswe or Mma Makutsi, but by Mma Potokwane.  One doesn't read a Sherlock Holmes story to have Inspector LeStrade step in and save the day.

Book review: Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

The tenth book I read in 2016 was my last Josephine Tey novel, Miss Pym Disposes.  Very different from her Alan Grant series, this book deals with a single woman who has rather surprised herself by writing a book on a hot topic which has brought her considerable fame and respect -- and the ability to quit her day job.  Lucy Pym accepts an invitation from an old school acquaintance who is now the headmistress of a girls' physical training college to give a lecture to the student body.  She is charmed enough by her re-entry into the company of the young and female to agree to stay on rather indefinitely through the end of the term.

A physical training college must have been a remarkable thing.  I spent a great deal of the book trying to figure out exactly what the girls were training to be.  It seems to have involved both anatomy and medical studies and sports, dance, gymnastics, and calisthenics, which is a double-bill one would be hard pressed to find today.  One doesn't go to Harvard Medical and Tennis.  It would seem that, once physically trained, the girls go on either to medical clinics or to sportsmistress positions at girls' schools, the latter of which is more prestigious.

If one didn't know that one was reading a Josephine Tey book and hadn't read the back-cover blurb promising a murder, one would think that this was simply a book about life among the students and faculty in a girls' college.  It's not that it's not an enjoyable read, without the promise of bloodshed, but if you're reading for the murder mystery, be aware that that aspect doesn't turn up until you're three-quarters of the way through the book.  I rather wish I hadn't read the blurb, as, as much as I was enjoying it, I kept thinking, "Yes, and...?  When are we going to get to it?"  I would characterize this more as a book in which a murder plays a role than as a murder mystery.  (And unlike most of Tey's other books, I was able to predict the killer in this case.)

Book review: The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith

The ninth book I read in 2016 was the fourteenth book in Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon.  In it, Mma Ramotswe deals with two cases.  The primary one has to do with an heir who may not be who he says he is; the secondary one is the one which provides the book's title, when the Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon is the victim of a malicious whisper campaign which threatens to put it out of business.  Both cases are dealt with in a manner unusual to detective novels in general but quite in character with Precious Ramotswe's methods, where reconciliation outweighs the exaction of justice and even the facts themselves.

The major development of the book, however, is the birth of Phuti and Grace Radiphuti's first child.  There is a bit of tension with Mma Makutsi's pregnancy: real tragedies have been few and far between in the series, but Mma Makutsi's hard-earned and well-deserved happiness always feels somewhat precarious.  The real disruption, however, comes when Mma Makutsi leaves the agency.  Despite having begun the business solo, Mma Ramotswe has had Mma Makutsi by her side virtually from the beginning.  The book ends with an act of love and generosity which cements the relationship between the two women.

Book review: The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff

The eighth book I read in 2016 was The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff, the final volume in what's referred to as her Roman Britain trilogy, following The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch, though Wikipedia lists eight books in the series.  These three appear to be the only ones readily available in a recent edition.

The Lantern Bearers is set something over a hundred years after The Silver Branch and opens with the latest descendents of Marcus and Cottia at home on the land he earned in The Eagle of the Ninth.  It is now a farm, though due to the retreat of ever-more-beleaguered Rome and the constant threat of Saxon raiders, its best days are behind it.  Young Aquila, like his forebears, serves in the Roman army stationed at Rutupiae, but when the last of the Roman troops are ordered back to defend the empire's nearer holdings, he deserts to make a last stand defending his family and his ancestors' lands.  Denied the death he expects, Aquila is left to live, first as a thrall to his Saxon enemies, then as a renegade, trying to find something to believe in when he has lost everything he has ever known and loved.

This is an excellent book, but it's much more bitter than its predecessors.  Eagle is full of hope for a future in a new land, and Branch at least holds out the hope of saving something from the oncoming disaster; The Lantern Bearers is a book about living in, and after, defeat.  Any novel which opens with a beloved sister ecstatically proclaiming how she loves being alive is going to close with her not: it's a corollary of Chekhov's Gun.  So, really, don't read this book thinking it's going to end well.

In spite of the general theme of loss, however, there are some striking depictions of hope in this book. Aquila, having deserted the ships just before they carry his fellow soldiers away, lights the lighthouse one last time; it is a beautiful image and, later in the story, revealed to have been a consolation in a time of trial to others.  And Brother Ninnias, the lone surviving monk of his monastery after it is overrun by Saxons, both warms and breaks the heart in the kindness and steadfast faith he shows to Aquila and the others left behind by Rome.

At the same time as The Lantern Bearers ends the Roman Britain trilogy, it can also be seen as a prequel to The Shining Company, itself a book accustomed to loss and resigned to defeat without giving in to bitterness and despair.

Book review: The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey

The seventh book I read in 2016 was the last of Josephine Tey's Alan Grant novels, The Singing Sands.  Inspector Grant is taking a leave of absence due to his nerves: a case of what we would today call claustrophobia.  Leaving behind the stresses of his job and the crowds of London, he is heading for a fishing holiday with family in Scotland when the sudden, unexplained death of a fellow passenger on his train intervenes to keep his mind off relaxation.

The title of the book derives from an incomplete snatch of verse written in the verge of the dead man's newspaper, a stanza which could have been left on the cutting room floor of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan":

The beasts that talk,

The streams that stand,

The stones that walk,

The singing sand,

.........

.........

That guard the way

To Paradise.

These lines haunt Grant and, despite his best intentions to relax and forget about his job back home, entice him to investigate what has already been written off by Scotland Yard as an accidental death.

In the course of his investigation, he meets a Scots nationalist, a young and eligible widow, a pilot, and a scholar.  In the end, he not only unravels the identities of both the dead man and his murderer but also plays a part in the discovery of a long-lost Xanadu -- and, incidentally, overcomes his fits of nerves and returns rejuvenated to the force.