Stories of Romance, Ambition, Kindness, and Happiness
Starred review from April 15, 2021
McCall Smith, internationally celebrated for his novels, especially the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, breaks new ground here with a collection of short stories spiked with some comics. The book is organized into thematic sections, including "Love," "Kindness," "Poignancy," and "Revenge," along with two especially whimsical sections: "Elevator Tales," about strange or serendipitous elevator encounters, and "Pope Ron," about the first Australian pope, who sports a tattoo of St. Francis of Assisi. McCall Smith's gift for quick characterization and his ability to conjure a range of moods, from philosophical to madcap, are on full display here. The best part of the book may be the sections titled "Amuse-Bouches." These are the graphic stories sprinkled throughout; artist Iain McIntosh, using heavy line drawings, illustrates McCall Smith's captions in panels that are sometimes zany-jokey, sometimes show sharp turns in fortune, and sometimes have an Aesop-like moral at the end. The "Amuse-Bouches" carry both serious and comic themes in groupings titled "Love," "Children and Their Parents," and "Life and Its Pitfalls" (with an incisive section called "Scientific Ethics: A Crash Course"). The graphic stories and the text-only ones all contain memorable characters, like a couple known as the "Virtue-Signallers," a Japanese passenger pusher, a contemporary Icarus on a hang glider, and a Russian cat with a face like Putin's. Quirky and delightful.
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