Thank heaven for small mercies. A few weeks ago, when the opportunity to interview Alexander McCall Smith came in over the transom, someone suggested we hang out in a music shop or maybe the Juilliard School of Music, where McCall Smith might noodle away on a borrowed bassoon.
You see, in addition to being one of the most prolific English-language authors working today, McCall Smith is also the co-founder of the Really Terrible Orchestra, an Edinburgh-based amateur musical outfit that is, by most accounts and its own admission, pretty awful.
But the bassoon plan has failed to come to fruition, which means the only aural assault in the offing will be the usual New York squawking street symphony endured on the way to a Belgian bakery café a stone's throw from Carnegie Hall.
“We are an optimistic orchestra,” McCall Smith says with tongue-in-cheek cheer, as he walks briskly along West 54th Street. “We never get invited anywhere, we invite ourselves. But we get very good houses for an uninvited orchestra.”
They have invited themselves to New York's Town Hall for a gig that will take place, appropriately enough, on April Fool's Day. “Our audiences actually very much enjoy themselves. They love the idea of a group of rank amateurs playing music, and not doing it very well.”
It's not that McCall Smith doesn't believe in excellence, but perhaps there are higher values, like community. Audiences at the RTO concerts participate in a Sound of Music sing-along medley and are given paper bags during the orchestra's rendition of the 1812 Overture to provide comical fortification of the cannons in Tchaikovsky's symphony.
A casual reader of McCall Smith's most popular series of books, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency , would recognize his abiding interest in community. The books, set in the Botswana capital of Gaborone, centre on Precious Ramotswe, a gentle, heavyset gal – she calls herself “traditionally built” – with a kindly husband and a couple of foster children. She spends her days solving low-grade mysteries and passing the time with her diligent but faintly humourless assistant, Mma Makutsi.
The series's 10th volume, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built , which will be published next month, follows Mma Ramotswe as she solves the mystery of a local soccer team that has lost its winning ways, but the book is more interested in Ramotswe's relationship with her ailing white van and her reflections on life in Botswana.
At one point, she evinces pity for the wife of a soccer player who spends most of her days alone: “She knew that it was not always easy for women in such places, where the easy companionship of the village had been replaced by the comparative anonymity of the town. ... We are born to talk to other people, she thought; we are born to be sociable and to sit together with others in the shade of an acacia tree and talk about things that happened the day before.”
“A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss,” says McCall Smith, 60, now sipping from a large latte in a bowl. “I think that's often a very powerful reason for people writing; a lot of people are trying to heal the separations that they find in their lives – a sense of separateness, sense of loss. Hence, novels about childhood.
“One of the things I think we're all aware of having lost, as our societies get more complex and larger, is the sense of – maybe this sounds tremendously trite, it's not a novel observation in any sense, but nonetheless true – is a sense of community and a sense of belonging to a small group, and sharing things in a certain, smallish group.
