Motivations

Of course, I still recognise that McCall Smith makes many interesting observations along the way in the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series. On the question of apparently unambitious men he says this (Tea Time, p.150):

‘You only thnk so, Mma? Have you not asked him?’
Mma Tafa sighed. ‘Not all men know what they want to do, Mma. Many of them say they are quite happy doing what they are doing, and do not know what they really want to do… underneath. You know what I mean, Mma?
‘I think I do’, said Mma Ramotswe.
‘So it is the job of women – and that means you and me, Mma – to find out what husbands really want to do, and then to tell them about it. That is our job, I think, Mma.’

I have been reflecting on motivation and decision-making rather a lot in the last few weeks. It's a complex business the more one thinks on this. House-buying, moving overseas, you name it, discerning God's will in all this (what a loaded phrase).

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

I think I understand why these No.1 Ladies Detective Agency books are so padded – it’s because they are written for serialisation. Almost every chapter contains either a mini-summary of the last chapter or else a synopsis of the entire plot to that point! Perfect for weekly or daily radio programmes, but painful if you are trying to read them in one or two sittings. Has Alexander McCall Smith received a fee from the radio dramatisation people to do most of their work for him!? 

I’m not quite sure whether to give the books a bad review, or applaud them for being accessible to people who might not otherwise do a lot of reading.

Actually, this latest one (Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, an entirely irrelevant title to anything in the novel, other than the rather tired joke about the heroine’s weight) was wittier and more interesting than the last few, certainly in the first 200 pages or so. But then McCall Smith ran out of space, and the plot threads were either sewn up in a couple of paragraphs, or quietly dropped.

These are certainly very well marketed works, though that does not inspire much faith in human nature, given the cloying quality to the blurb on TT’s dust jacket… “and, as wise and warm hearted as his heroine, Alexander McCall Smith reminds us that we must dig deep to uncover the great goodness of the human heart”. Not only a dubious sentiment but also not a fair representation of the book in question!

And yet, despite my extremely mixed feelings about them (see here for a day when I was better disposed!), I continue to read them. Like being addicted to really watery hot chocolate made with UHT milk. You can’t really blame the drink or the one who made it, but the one who keeps asking for it…

Duchamp, Dutch Calvinists, crime fiction

In his crime novel The Brutal Art, Jesse Kellerman (son of thriller-writing duo Jonathan and Faye) gives us this intriguing passage (among many).

Watching him [an expert draughts player] I felt a thrill similar to what I felt the first time I saw Victor's drawings. That might sound strange, so let me explain. Genius takes many forms, and in our century we have (slowly) come to appreciate that the transcendence given by Picasso is potentially found in other, less obvious places. It was that old reliable provocateur, Marcel Duchamp, who showed this when he abandoned object-making, moved to Buenos Aires, and took up chess full-time. The game, he remarked, 'has all the beauty of art, and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer.' At first glance Duchamp seems to be lamenting the corrupting power of money. Really, though, he's being much more subversive than that. He is in fact destroying the conventional boundaries of art, arguing that all forms of expression - all of them - are potentially equal. Painting is the same as chess, which is the same as rollerskating, which is the same as standing at your kitchen stove, making soup. In fact, any one of those plain old everyday activities is better than conventional art, better than painting, because it is done without the sanctimony of anointing oneself 'an artist'. There is no surer route to mediocrity; as Borges wrote, the desire to be a genius is 'the basest of art's temptations'. (pp.280-1)

So, Duchamp was only a couple of centuries behind the Calvinists, and only 1850 years behind the apostle Paul.

Still, can't expect even a decent crime novelist to know everything about intellectual history!

What he then says about genius is less true, in my opinion, because I don't accept the ethic of the pure act, but it gets one thinking...

According to this understanding, then , true genius has no self-awareness. A genius must by definition be someone who does not stop to consider what he is doing, how it will be received, or how it will affect him and his future; he simply acts. He pursues his activity with a single-mindedness that is inherently unhealthy and frequently self-destructive. (p.281)

That is probably, sadly, historically accurate for many people, but genius doesn't have to be like that...

Icelandic crime

I'm not talking about profligate banking. Over Christmas I caught up on the books I won in the competition last year. Icelandic crime novels...

The film Jar City was quite decent. The book it was based on (Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indridason) had, surprisingly, a less interesting plot, largely because the tension wasn’t built or maintained properly. Unfortunately books 2-4 in the series are not really any better. Indriadson seems to be following a formula for the architecture – take one old mystery, interweave it with the detectives chatting to people about it, dovetail the plots, bathetic finale. No detection seems to take place, people confess at random, and realism is really strained at times.

That said, learning a little about Iceland is interesting, and the 4th book, about Cold War shenanigans up north, is particularly poignant. The 5th book in the series is an improvement. Again, little by way of detection – perhaps that simply reflects reality – but a more satisfying story and a truly “Icelandic murder”, which according to Indriadason involve no planning or sophistication, plenty of impulse and stupidity, some brutality and some mess.