Gentleness is an increasingly rare characteristic in a world dominated by gratuitous violence, and that may well account for the astonishing success of the series of books about Precious Ramotswe, “Botswana’s foremost solver of problems.”
Once more in The Miracle at Speedy Motors (Pantheon, $22.95, 224 pages) she is a lady who believes in bringing about happy endings and she nearly always finds the best in the clients who seek her out at the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, care of Tlokwing Road, Speedy Motors, Gaborone, Botswana. Which premises are owned by her husband, Mr. J.L.B Matekoni, a man who equals Mma. Ramotswe in generosity, patience and compassion.
It has been reported that author Alexander McCall Smith, a professor emeritus of law at Edinburgh University in Scotland, was surprised at the success of books which are piquant enough to avoid the epithet of sentimentality. He shouldn’t have been.
Nobody else seems to be writing much that isn’t drenched in blood embellished by sadism and devoid of subtlety or skill in presentation. Even allegedly autobiographical chronicles too often turn out to be sensational fiction swallowed by publishers so desperate for the fleeting glitter of fake celebrity that they fail to check reality. And of course there is the flow of lucrative self-help tracts written in a syrupy psychobabble that purports to offer up the recipe for happiness.
If Dr Smith didn’t exist, we should have had to invent him.
He is that rare creature known as a storyteller. He eschews the savagery of the ancient fairytales while retaining their eternal charm. His Botswana is obviously warm and familiar territory to him, a world where the dead are “late” and where the gods are reluctant to wish punishment on the living, no matter their t ransgressions. It is Mma Ramotswe’s view that “It was far more likely there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked, transforming them.”
This is surely her philosophy. She is a woman who, when bombarded by nasty anonymous letters, not only discovers their author but sends her a message of apology for having upset her to the point that she was angry enough to write such abuse.
“You should not have written to us the way you did but I am still saying sorry for anything we have done,”writes Mma Ramotswe after debating the reasons that could have forced her abuser to such unkindness. The complications arising from the purchase of a red velvet bed for Mma Makutsi, the ambitious assistant to Mma Ramotswe, and the location of a family for a woman who fears she is an orphan are other preoccupations of the busy pair of detectives at Speedy Motors.
Yet the most intriguing turn of the book is that there is no traditional miracle at Speedy Motors, despite the efforts and money expended by Mma Ramotswe and Mr J.L.B Maketoni to restore life and movement to their crippled adopted child.
Sipping her red bush tea, Mma Ramotswe reminds herself that there is more than one kind of miracle. Like the life giving rains that turned Botswana green and made cattle fat. Or the woman who sought help in finding her brother and was delighted by the revelation that since they proved to be unrelated, he could become her husband. Although there remains the problem of the “ominous knocking sound” in Mma Ramotswe’s tiny white van in which she trundles around the countryside. For that pesky sound to vanish would be another miracle but she reminds herself that “one should not ask for too many things in this life, especially when one already had so much.”
•••
Moving right along from the possibility that people can be kind to each other, there is the world of Dave White’s The Evil That Men Do (Random House, $13.95, 304 pages), which is a veritable blizzard of murders, mayhem, bombings, beatings and brutality. Mr. White has a crisp writing style and his plot roars along in its trail of blood, yet there is almost nothing and nobody intriguing in the book, and it leaves you wondering whether it is just easier to deal with black and white and ignore the many shades of gray that make up even criminals.
Leaving out nothing unpleasant leaves the reader not only with a sense of distaste but a feeling that a lot has been left out in this account of a family and its unsavory secrets which are as grim as you get.
Even the affection between embittered private investigator Jackson Dunne and his sister seems grudging, although she emerges as one of the few characters with a claim to humanity. That’s part of the problem. Mr. White is so obsessed with the bitter and bloody world of his tough investigator that he forgets that hints of vulnerability may not make villains more forgivable, but it does make them more understandable.
However, if what you want is shoot-em up and blow-em up, this is for you.
Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.