The Private Side of Friendship by Alexander McCall Smith review: 'pushing into new territory'
Set during the miners’ strike, the latest stand-alone novel from Alexander McCall Smith takes his characters from the affluent streets of Marchmont to the coalfields of West Lothian, writes David Robinson
It’s 1984, the middle of the miners’ strike, and at a packed meeting at Armadale Town Hall, a union leader walks onto the stage and rallies the faithful of the West Lothian coalfield. He speaks eloquently, emotionally, and at some length. And if you are thinking that Alexander McCall Smith is pushing into new territory with his latest stand-alone novel, you are absolutely right: this is indeed a far cry from Merchiston.
But not too far. The main focus is on six Edinburgh University students sharing a flat in Marchmont. Only one of them - Angela - is working-class, and whether it’s out of solidarity with her, or the miners, or just because they want to find out more, two of them accompany her back to her Armadale home and sit in the back row at the town hall rally.
That scene, though, is halfway through the novel, which opens in 1988, when Julie, an assistant at a Glasgow gallery, looking through an art student’s portfolio, picks out a portrait of four young friends. It strikes a chord: the figures in his painting seem to be starting out on their lives, yet there’s a valedictory feeling about it too, along with something else: a hint, perhaps, of unrequited love...
Cut to 1984. Julie is an art history student and looking at a third-floor flat in Marchmont overlooking the Meadows. The landlady says it will sleep six, but no more, and Julie sets about filling the rooms. The three male and three female students she chooses are studying different subjects. There may well be a seventh, but if there is, mentioning it would be as much of a spoiler as going in too deep on the subject of unrequited love, because there’s a heck of a lot of that going on, certainly involving more than one couple.
Julie yearns for a soulmate, and after she has interviewed the three male flatmates she realises she could quite happily become involved with any of them. The unspoken rules of flatsharing, of course, are that this would be a terrible idea. Love has to be fallen into, not neatly planned: the private side of friendship demands it. Some feelings have to be kept to oneself.
Not always though. Being a student also means at least starting to become independent, and having a mind open to new ideas. Take politics student Georgia. She’s posh, English and innately conservative (why don’t students have posters of Edmund Burke on their walls as well as ones of Che, she wonders: he hated injustice and poverty too) and yet she goes along with Angela to find out more about West Lothian's striking miners.
Although McCall Smith is the master of the serial novel, this was clearly always going to be a standalone. Its whole subject is the apprenticeship for adulthood that studenthood so often represents: that specific time when childhood friendships start to fade and new ones form; when one can feel loneliness in a crowded flat or lecture hall. This whole process of change is neatly mirrored in what is happening in the country at large, as glimpsed in the Armadale miners’ rally.
Angela’s take on the strike is straightforward: it’s the moment the country has to decide whether to turn itself into a business (and an uncaring one at that) or to value bone-deep communal values of mining towns. The latter view gets a lot of support, not just from the students’ landlady (“a bit of a socialist”), but arguably also from Hamish Henderson singing ‘Freedom Come All Ye’ in a brief appearance at Sandy Bell’s.
In the end, of course, the miners lost. Georgia might have gone to Armadale and tried to sympathise, but ultimately she realises the folly of persisting with uneconomic pits. From that defeat, you might think, it would be hard to fashion any kind of happy ending. Somehow, in this typically thoughtful and entertaining novel, McCall Smith manages to create at least two of them.
The Private Side of Friendship, by Alexander McCall Smith, Polygon, £17.99
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