THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BERTIE: A 44 Scotland Street Novel
Alexander McCall Smith
Anchor Books
Fiction
ISBN: 9780307387066
Six-year-old child prodigy Bertie introduces us to new insights on the residents of his townhouse condominium at 44 Scotland Street.
Having returned unscathed from his misadventures in Paris with a teenage jazz band, he has resettled with his family, now larger by one with brother Ulysses. Bertie was excited about the new baby, confident that his insufferable mother would turn her attentions to the newborn. Poor Bertie --- clever child that he is, he could not have dreamed that his mum, intent on improving the world, would see Bertie and Ulysses as harbingers of change to the ways that boys looked at infant nurturing. As Bertie is introduced to every facet of infant care, he begins to think that some childless couple, somewhere, would welcome Ulysses into their lives. Changing diapers is one thing, but the breast pump is one step too far in gender social change.
Regular readers might remember that Bertie’s father mislaid his car on an Edinburgh side street that led to Bertie’s education being broadened through introduction to the underbelly of Glasgow auto thievery. Now his absent-minded father has returned home from a stroll with Ulysses in the pram to the pharmacy with the pills but no pram, and, more importantly, no Ulysses. The search for his brother introduces Bertie to yet another side of the law through Edinburgh’s social welfare system. Bertie, meanwhile, is hopeful that his lost little brother has found a home with a loving and hopefully normal family. Life in Bertie’s family continues to prove educational in unconventional ways.
Meanwhile, Cyril, Angus Lordie’s opinionated dog, has been arrested as a suspect in a series of ankle-biting incidents on Prince Street. Poor Angus, whose life revolves around Cyril, is thrown into an artistic funk and cannot apply brush to canvas in his devastation over the threat of Cyril’s demise at the hands of animal control. Angus and Bertie have a chance meeting at the Edinburgh police station, which leads the two of them to resolve poor Cyril’s dilemma.
The other denizens of 44 Scotland Street are similarly engaged in their individual slices of life, yet Alexander McCall Smith’s engaging way of looking through a slightly different lens makes their lives remarkable, often in philosophically whimsical ways.
When McCall Smith began his episodic series about four families in a mythical apartment building on Edinburgh’s Scotland Street, he could not have imagined that these anecdotal snippets would turn into a successful novel, let alone four. Each of the residents and their widening circle of friends provide a lighthearted look at life in Edinburgh’s upper middle class. Infinitely civilized, educated and well-bred, they represent coffee house and art gallery owners, accountants, artists, anthropologists, editors, pub patrons, a lothario, a Serbian plasterer with a one-word English vocabulary, a dog, a cat, and especially a precocious six-year-old with a fascinating secret to share.
Stirred by curiosity, I Googled a map of Edinburgh for 44 Scotland Street and discovered that there is, indeed, a Scotland Street and all of the other colorful places McCall Smith describes, but the last address listed is at Number 43. The author’s sense of place flows through his two series in Edinburgh and his most famous No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana, Africa, making us feel right at home in these places he clearly loves.
--- Reviewed by Roz Shea
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