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Summary
Summary
Conspiracy of Friends
Author Notes
Alexander McCall Smith was born on August 24, 1948 in Zimbabwe. He was a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, but he left in 2005 to focus on his writing. He has written over 60 books, including specialist academic titles including Forensic Aspects of Sleep and The Criminal Law of Botswana, short story collections including Portuguese Irregular Verbs, and children's books including The Perfect Hamburger. He is best known for the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. He also writes the Corduroy Mansions, Isabel Dalhousie and 44 Scotland Street series.
He has received numerous awards, including The Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library Award and the 2004 United Kingdom's Author of the Year Award. His book, The Full Cupboard of Life, received the Saga Award for Wit in the United Kingdom. In 2007, he received a CBE for his services in literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Short on plot but teeming with charm, this confection takes its cue from Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. For the third time, Smith (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) visits the self-contained fictional world encompassing the residents of Corduroy Mansions in London's Pimlico neighborhood. The book opens by introducing an immense ensemble cast, which includes Oedipus Snark, "the only truly nasty Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament"; his mother, Berthea, at work on a "hostile biography" of her son; Berthea's brother, a New Ager called Terence Moongrove; literary agent (and Snark's former lover) Barbara Ragg; her odious business partner, Rupert Porter; as well as the hapless, affable wine merchant William French and his dog, Freddie de la Hay. Each has his or her own tale: a conflict at work, a longing for love, the search for new smells (that would be Freddie). There are as many plots in this genial, satisfying narrative as there are characters, and it's a testament to Smith's gifts as a storyteller that he's able to bind the whole together with such a slender narrative thread. His ample humor and grace helps. Agent: Robin Straus. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* McCall Smith, who sets his Scotland Street and Corduroy Mansions series in upscale tenement buildings, produces vivid portraits of his characters much in the same way that early twentieth-century photographer Jacob Riis did with his images of squalid, early-twentieth-century tenement life: by throwing open the doors of apartments and capturing the life within in one quick flash. McCall Smith also shows how living in close proximity to others takes people out of their own narrow rounds, sometimes into true community (or conspiracy ). In the third Corduroy Mansions novel (which, like the first two, originally appeared in daily installments in the London Telegraph), we're reintroduced to such indelible Londoners as Berthea Snark, a psychiatrist with a well-founded loathing for her MP son, Oedipus; Barbara Ragg, a literary agent who escaped the snares of Oedipus and is now happily in love with a Scotsman; and William French, a wine merchant who failed his master of wine degree because of intoxication. The two moral poles of the novel are Oedipus, known as the only nasty Liberal Democrat in Parliament, who is satisfied but sociopathic, and French, resoundingly good but feeling directionless and dissatisfied. And then there is French's brilliant terrier, Freddie de la Hay, who throws everything into confusion by disappearing. McCall Smith is by turns hilarious at capturing foibles and meditative about the huge role chance and the plots of others play in our lives. Fascinating fare. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: How can a writer as prolific as McCall Smith continue to be so popular? Ask his millions of fans, who will be waiting in line for this one.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Review
The third installment in a series concerning the denizens of London's Corduroy Mansions. Member of Parliament Oedipus Snark has been appointed Undersecretary of This and That, but his psychotherapist mother Berthea still doesn't like him. Nor does his ex-lover Barbara Ragg, whose knowledge of his unsavory past gives her an unexpected opportunity for revenge. It's likely to provide cold comfort from a rift that looms with her fianc, Hugh, after the confessions they feel impelled to make to each other, or the revenge of his own that Rupert Porter, Barbara's partner in the literary agency their fathers founded, plots after Barbara decides not to sell him the flat her father left her after all. Wine merchant William French's son Eddie, financed by his heiress girlfriend, Merle, hires Cosmo Bartonette, the sharpest design eye in London, to decorate a space he wants to turn into a Hemingway-themed restaurant, and in the process he learns a bit about both Cosmo and himself. William's own quiet life is complicated by an avowal of love as unexpected as it is unwelcome and by the disappearance of his beloved Pimlico Terrier Freddie de la Hay, late of MI6 (The Dog Who Came in from the Cold, 2011, etc.). Caroline Jarvis, William's downstairs neighbor, wonders whether life will offer her any deeper relationships than the one she enjoys with her best, best friend James. And Berthea's brother, Terence Moongrove, moves up from his new Porsche to become part owner of a racecar he intends to drive himself. This third volume of Chekhovian soap opera is every bit as addictive as the first two. Fans will be sad to see any of the plots tied up, even by happy endings, and hope for more complications next season.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. The Only Unpleasant Liberal Democrat Oedipus Snark had a number of distinctions in this life. The first of these--and perhaps the most remarkable--was that he was, by common consent, the only truly nasty Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament. This was not just an accolade bestowed upon him by journalists in search of an amusing soubriquet, it was a judgement agreed upon by all those who knew him, including, most notably, his mother. Berthea Snark, a well-known psychoanalyst who lived in a small, undistinguished mews house behind Corduroy Mansions, had tried very hard to love her son, but had eventually given up, thus joining that minuscule group--mothers who cannot abide their sons. So rare is the phenomenon, and so willing are most mothers to forgive their sons any shortcoming, that this demographic--that is to say, in English, these people --is completely ignored by marketeers. And that, as we all know, is the real test of significance. If marketeers ignore you, you are not worth bothering about; you are nothing; you are--to put it brutally--a nondemographic . So intense was Berthea's distaste for her son that she had once seriously contemplated arranging a DNA test to see whether there was any chance that Oedipus had been mixed up with her real infant in hospital and given to the wrong mother. She knew that this was clutching at straws, but she had read about such errors in a popular psychology magazine and concluded that there was a chance, just a chance, that it had happened to her. The author of the article had for years researched the psychological profile of those who had lived a large part of their life under a false belief as to the identity of their father and had only later discovered the mistake. In the course of discussing this not entirely uncommon problem, the author had casually mentioned two cases of a rather different error, where the woman thought to be mother was discovered not to be mother after all. One of these cases had been of a boy who had been given by his mother to her sister in an act of generosity. The donor, who had six children already, had decided that her childless sister's need for a baby was greater than her own and had generously--and not without some relief--donated this seventh child. It had worked to the satisfaction of all, and when the truth slipped out--as the truth sometimes does in spite of our best efforts to conceal it--the reaction of the boy, now a young man of eighteen, had been admirable. There had been no recriminations, or sense of betrayal: he had gone straight to the florist, purchased a large bouquet of flowers and handed it to the woman who he had assumed all those years was his real mother. Love, he had written on the accompanying card, is thicker than blood. Berthea could not imagine Oedipus doing such a thing. In fact, she found it difficult to remember when her son had last given her a present; not that she held it against him, even if she had noted it as a point that she might at least touch upon in a suitable chapter of the unauthorised biography of him that she was currently writing. And here was the second of his distinctions: there are few, if any, examples of hostile biographies written by mothers. Berthea, though, was well advanced in her plans, and the manuscript of the work provisionally entitled My Son Oedipus was already two hundred and ten typewritten pages long. Those pages took us only as far as the end of Oedipus's schooldays. He had been sent to boarding school when he was ten, spending a short time at a very dubious prep school in the West Country before winning a scholarship to Uppingham. The prep school, now closed down by the authorities, was found to be a moneylaundering scheme dreamed up by an Irish racehorse owner; and while the boys were for the most part entirely happy (not surprisingly, given that the headmaster took them to the racetrack three times a week), their education left a great deal to be desired. Oedipus, though, had thrived, and had won the Uppingham scholarship by arranging for another boy at the school, an intellectual prodigy, to impersonate him in the scholarship examination. This had the desired result and brought, rather to the surprise of his mother, an offer of a full scholarship, covering the cost of tuition and boarding. "I know I'm failing as a mother," Berthea confessed to a friend at the time. "I'm perfectly aware of that. But, quite frankly, much as I love my son, I'm always relieved when Oedipus goes off to school. I know I shouldn't feel this, but it's as if a great load is lifted from my shoulders each time I see him off. I feel somehow liberated." "I'm not surprised," said the friend. "And you mustn't reproach yourself. Your son is a particularly unpleasant child--I've always thought so." This verdict on Oedipus was shared by almost all his contemporaries at school. When Berthea had advertised in the school association magazine for "recollections--no matter how frank--of the schooldays of Oedipus Snark, MP," she had been astonished by the unanimity of opinion. "I remember Oedipus Snark quite well," wrote one of her informants. "He was the one we all disliked intensely. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, as I gather that you're his mother, but we really couldn't stand the sight of him. What on earth possessed you to have him?" And there was this from another: "Can you give me his current address? I promise I won't pass it on to anybody. I just want to know--for my own purposes." Of course, Berthea did not pass on her son's address to that particular correspondent. She did not want Oedipus to meet any physical misfortune; she wanted him simply to be exposed, to be made to confront his shortcomings, to accept responsibility . And was there anything wrong with that? she wondered. Does it make me any the less of a mother for wanting to see justice done? She had thought long and hard about what it was to be a mother. And from that, inspired by the article she read about disproof of maternity, the idea came to her that there had been a fairly long pause between the point at which Oedipus was taken from her in the maternity ward and the moment he was returned to her bedside. It was, she remembered, at least an hour, and during that time, as a nurse informed her, another three babies had been born. "We've been worked off our feet, Mrs. Snark," said the nurse. "Four babies in two hours! All of them boys. A population explosion, that's what it is." Berthea now thought: four boys, all lying in those tiny cots they put newborn babies in; physically indistinguishable, at that age, one from the other; identified only by a little plastic bracelet which could so easily slip off, be picked up and put on the wrong baby. Surely it could happen. Or was that just wishful thinking? Excerpted from A Conspiracy of Friends by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
