The music endures

kw: book reviews, fiction

I read very little mainstream fiction. Having read four of Alexander McCall Smith's Ladies' Detective Agency series, when I saw a volume outside that series, I decided to try it. McCall Smith has also three other series, but La's Orchestra Saves the World is in none of them. It is, instead, a tale of growth and transformation in rural wartime England.

Throughout the novel, until the very end, La, or Lavender, is drawn along by events. She is married then widowed (during divorce proceedings) at a young age, installed in a country villa by her ex-husband's parents, employed as a farm worker to help the war effort, prodded into starting a village orchestra by a friend in the military, finds herself falling in love with another soul who has "dropped through the cracks", conducts a "victory concert" shortly after V-E Day, and finds herself quite adrift as she moves back to London to a house she has inherited.

Even visiting her old tutor at Cambridge simply returns her to the uncertainty and timidity of her undergraduate days. It is only at the very end that her own character, which we've seen only hints of throughout, prevails. With a single sentence she changes her own life as profoundly as the war had changed everything and everyone else.

The author is a master of dialog and inner soliloquy. With these he builds sympathetic characters for us to enjoy. In the Ladies' Detective Agency novels, the rhythms of language and thought, which usher us into the minds of the principal characters, convey the mental habits of native Setswana speakers. In this novel the linguistic habits seem much more familiar, at least to an Anglo-American like me. Yet La is a very different person from myself, and it takes all of McCall Smith's skill to get me into her skull.

Having sampled this very different side of the author, I have gained an interest in seeing how he handles the characters in the three series I haven't touched.