The Great Hippopotamus Hotel by Alexander McCall Smith review: 'full of generous understanding'
Although in some respects they seem to hark back to a bygone age, in terms of their sexual politics the novels of Alexander McCall Smith could hardly be more contemporary, writes Allan Massie
Strange things have been going on at the Great Hippopotamus Hotel which, if not Botswana's ritziest, is still a well thought-of place. When Mma Makusi, Mma Ramotswe's assistant or self-styled partner at The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, learns that Violet Sephothu may be involved in the case, she leaps to conclusions, disregarding the sage advice to be found in Clovis Andersen's masterpiece The Principles of Private Detection, which is to wise detectives what The Care of the Pig by Augustus Whiffle was to Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth.
Mma Makusi is certain of Violet's guilty involvement in whatever is disturbing the hotel because she was a loose woman and a lazy student at the Botswana Secretarial College, from which on the other hand Mma Makusi graduated with a mark of 97 per cent. Mma Makusi is indeed a very efficient lady, if somewhat given to leaping to conclusions, something the great Clovis Andersen warned against.
Mma Ramotswe, however, works in a wiser and different manner, but values her assistant as she values everything that is good. Also, as loyal readers of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series will know, her greatest gift is her power of sympathetic understanding. Mma Makusi is sometimes impatient with men but Mma Ramotswe is more forgiving; they are weak things but can be improved through sympathy and good sense. She is a very kind lady, possibly the kindest detective in fiction.
It's little wonder that Alexander McCall Smith's international breakthrough to global bestseller came when an American President's wife - Mrs Bush senior, as I recall - happened on the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, praised them to the sky, quite deservedly of course - and had members of women's clubs dashing sedately to the bookshops. Not even JFK's boosting of James Bond could match that.
McCall Smith's novels have a charm that seems to belong to a possibly mythical older time, but in one sense they are very much of our own day. He is a feminist. His women, especially but not only in the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, are better, kinder, more moral and sensible than the men. In one way he is also kinder than many of our more strident feminist novelists. Men are feebler, lazier and sillier than the women. Generously, however, Mma Ramotswe sees them as capable of learning and improving.
She is also willing to see the good in husbands who behave foolishly - for example, she rightly recognises that a small man here who buys a wildly unsuitable sports car for his 60th birthday is really only a sad thing afraid of his domineering wife, and that she too should behave better.
Indeed, his women are not always without blemish. Here Mma Makusi is a bit too pleased with herself and too convinced of her superior intellect. Likewise in the Isobel Dalhousie series, Isobel has sometimes to be put right by her (unusually) gentle young husband Jamie. All the same, anyone reading his novels must surely be convinced that the world would be a better and nicer place if men would simply leave things to women.
Yet, though McCall Smith is very much a novelist of our time, his work hails back to an older Scotland, too, to the work of writers like JM Barrie, SR Crockett and the others recognized and condemned as "the Kailyard" - unkindly and wrongly condemned, I should add. Enjoying this new Botswana novel, I heard faint echoes of A Window in Thrums. There is the same charm, the same acuteness, the same humour, the same generous understanding. Indeed I'm now searching my bookshelves in search of Thrums, aka Kirriemuir.
The Great Hippopotamus Hotel, by Alexander McCall Smith, Abacus, £20
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