Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith

Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith
Buy Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: Magda Healey
Summary: The jokes are intelligent, the characters endearing and the whole lot is rather lovely without being mawkish: an effortlessly pleasant read which leaves one with a warm fuzzy feeling that things are - essentially - right with humanity.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 320	Date: July 2009
Publisher: Polygon
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1846971211
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Alexander McCall Smith, clearly encouraged by the success of his Edinburgh episodic novel 44 Scotland Street has now - quite fittingly, considering the Dickensian origins of the whole daily novel exercise - moved down South to London. Corduroy Mansions, set in London's Pimlico, has been serialised on-line on the the Daily Telegraph's website (in written as well as audio format) and is now available as a solid book.

Corduroy Mansions, just like 44 Scotland Street did, follows the lives of a group of disparate characters living in the apartment block of the title as well as others connected to them.

We have a widowed wine merchant and his wastrel of a grown up son; a health shop assistant with a unshakeable belief in iridology and colonic irrigation; a very serious PR girl to an MP; the MP himself (possibly the only truly nasty LibDem MP, called Oedipus Snark); his psychoanalyst mother, who's writing his unflattering biography; the mother's brother who lives in Cheltenham and communes with higher beings via dancing; MP's lover and literary agent on the trial of Yeti; an art history student who though he was gay but is having second thoughts; and a dog.

Corduroy Mansions consists of a hundred short chapters, some even readable by themselves. It's a chatty, sweet, meandering book, infused with intelligent humour and amiable humanity. McCall Smith knows what his fans love him for and continues to deliver the goods.

It delivers a benevolent commentary on the quirks of human nature and absurdities of modern life, occasionally exasperated but almost always kind. There is plenty of authorial wisdom but it's always tongue-in-cheek, with a wink towards the reader. My favourite phrase was: For just as small American boys may, in their log cabins, dream of the White House, so may small British boys, in their mews houses, dream of the House of Commons. The reader is not patronised even if the characters occasionally are.

Some scenes are supremely funny, most are pleasantly amusing – and 'pleasantly amusing' is what could be the shortest review of Corduroy Mansions , and possibly even the whole fiction oeuvre of Alexander McCall Smith as well.

'Gentle' is another adjective often applied to McCall Smith's fiction, and gentle it is, but it's also very much genteel. It seems to me that in British fiction – apart from the special case of chick/lad-lit - people living in flats are either sink-estate desperates or decidedly middle/upper middle class; and this is true in the case of Corduroy Mansions. In some eerie way (and with nothing to do with the mood or even type of the story) I was reminded of Anita Brookner and P D James.

It's not a very memorable book, and it's not likely to leave a lasting impression or change the way anyone looks at the world, but then it doesn't attempt to. While it's there, being read, it's rather lovely without being mawkish: an effortlessly pleasant read which leaves one with a warm fuzzy feeling that things are - essentially - right with humanity.

Recommended for all but the most uncompromising fans of grit and grime.

Thanks to the publishers for sending this book to the Bookbag.

If you like that, you will like The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. We also think you'll enjoy Summer on Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber and might want to consider The Road Home by Rose Tremain.

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