My brother acquired the first five or six books in the series, in hardback yet, read them and fairly quickly decided to get rid of them. He gave them to me, I read them in quick succession on an ineptly-routed train trip from Oxford to Cheltenham, and I found them equally underwhelming and donated them to a happy local library at the next opportunity.
They're calming, but after four in a row it's as if I'd spent the entire bus ride eating only moderately nutritious stew with comforting dumplings in; I suppose to some extent they're anti-science-fiction, set in a world which knows it's very traditional but thinks all the alternative possibilities are worse. It feels as if there's at least half a dimension missing from the characters.
As does, in fact, almost all of the rest of the prodigious output of Alexander McCall Smith; it may well be the kind of writing for which the appropriate description is 'bourgeois'.
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Date: 2006-05-07 08:48 am (UTC)They're calming, but after four in a row it's as if I'd spent the entire bus ride eating only moderately nutritious stew with comforting dumplings in; I suppose to some extent they're anti-science-fiction, set in a world which knows it's very traditional but thinks all the alternative possibilities are worse. It feels as if there's at least half a dimension missing from the characters.
As does, in fact, almost all of the rest of the prodigious output of Alexander McCall Smith; it may well be the kind of writing for which the appropriate description is 'bourgeois'.