"Chance Developments" by Alexander McCall Smith

An audio book. 5 chatty stories.

In “Sister Flora’s First Day Of Freedom” a young Catholic nun comes into money and decides to leave the nunnery to chastely find a man in Edinburgh. After a slow and shallow start, it doesn't improve. Maybe it's a pastiche of an old style. I decided to continue reading.

“Angels In Italy” - a shy boy who made a girl pregnant at 16 in 1936 meets her again when they're 48. She's a widow and grandmother. He's become a famous artist. Predictable plot. It doesn't work for me.

"Dear ventriloquist" - Eddie, from a good home in Canada, becomes a magician at a circus. He stands in for the doll of a female ventriloquist, but she puts no words into his mouth. She marries someone else. He happily marries too. The End.

"The woman with the beautiful car" - A father retires, hoping his son will take over the little village school, but he misses university life in Dublin. He sees a girl he likes. He uses a cunning ruse to meet her. "It was almost as if the decision to act was being made by someone else altogether, some agency, some other presence that was within him operating through his mind but at the same time nothing to do with him. This, he thought, is how it must feel to be possessed, to be aware that what you did was the act of something, some other person within you that was not the real self, not the self that looked out at the world through your eyes when you woke each morning, that accompanied you through the day, that experienced and remembered the things that happened to you". I quote this to show how wordy the narrators can be. The couple end up marrying, settling down locally. The predictable punchline is that she knew about the ruse. That's it.

“He Wanted To Believe In Tenderness” - David, a little son of mining-village Australians watches his parents fall out. He goes to university to study engineering. He meets a Jewish girl, Hannah. Before completing his degree he joins the army and ends up a PoW in a Japanese camp. Hannah waits and they marry. Hannah, soon after having a child, Rachel, goes off with someone else. Years later, after Rachel lost the use of her legs, they live together again for the rest of their lives.

Women often take the lead in these stories, being prepared to wait/propose.

Other reviews

• Kirkus review
• goodreads
• Roger Cox

"What W.H. Auden can do for you" by Alexander McCall Smith (Princeton University Press, 2013)

McCall Smith gives us his personal reaction to the works of W.H. Auden. The book "does not purport to be a work of criticism". Also "It is not a hagiography - it recognises that Auden has been taken to task for trying to be too clever, for using words for effect and without real regard to their meaning, and for being juvenile" (p.3) though I didn't note any of that recognition later.

McCall Smith gives us some anecdotes - e.g. when he read "thrushes" in an Auden piece it reminded him of the 3 small birds that might be thrushes in the background of a painting of Heaney. He thinks that poets know what they're doing, and likes things to be evoked in a ne'er so well expressed way, haunting and poignant. -

• "But this, although interesting, does not change the fact that Auden himself knew what he meant when he wrote those lines and disowned that meaning - the fact that the lines can be given an innocent interpretation is neither here nor there" (p.52)
• "lines that demonstrate Auden's consummate ability to create arresting imagery that proves unexpectedly difficult to interpret. We read the line and it seems so easy, so true" (p.63)
• "the appreciation of sublime music or gazing upon a great painting can charge and inspire us somehow to be better than we currently are" (p.89)

The most interesting section was at the end where he writes about how people find meaning in life -

• "Choice and responsibility are in fact two of the great themes in Auden's earlier work" (p.55)
• "We should not see Auden's adoption of a Christian position as a retreat into the comfort of a sheltering creed" (p.128)
• "His particular insight was that we need to be at home ... This insight was evident in the early Auden but became stronger and more clearly expressed with the passage of time ... His nightmare was an absence of belonging - the life of the anonymous city in which we are all strangers ... It is very difficult to protect ourselves from fast-food chains or standardized coffee bars" (p.134-5)
• "By helping us to understand our choices, by illuminating our life and encouraging us to feel grateful for it, Auden assists the cause of freedom" (p.137)

If you're a McCall Smith fan, maybe this book's worth reading. It's short (though could still benefit from editing to remove repetition), and introduces general readers to a few of Auden's pieces.