The Charming Quirks of Others

I found little to like in THE CHARMING QUIRKS OF OTHERS. A dozen "major" characters roll aimlessly about today's Edinburgh, bouncing off one another's egos and hurt psyches like billiard balls. In her many conversations, moral philosopher Isabel Dalhousie flits by association from one unrelated idea to another. Sometimes her interlocutors take her lame associations of ideas for wisdom. *** Isabel does a lot of walking through various parts of Scotland's ancient capital. And this "quirk" is inded "charming" as well as healthy. It also rings true from my visits: the townspeople are tremendous walkers. Still, Isabel becomes so distraught after an emotional confrontation with a rival for her fiance's affection that she has to take a taxi back home after walking to her showdown. And this allegedly very academic moral professional philosopher receives and accepts advice about what to do from the canny cabbie. It is hard to imagine a Scottish doctor or lawyer of any period doing the same stooping for advice. Author Smith's passing treatment of Sir Walter Scott's home at Abbotsford is all surface, and very tired and unconvincing surface at that. *** The underlying plot: Dalhousie is engaged in an evil cause by a married woman. The plan is to shoot down the candidacies of three men to become headmaster of a private Scottish school for boys 8 - 18. The incumbent, after a dozen years presiding, is about to depart for a headmastership in SIngapore. And an anonymous letter handwritten in green ink says that there is some unspecified something wrong hovering over one unidentified candidate. Isabel Dalhousie, after perfunctory prying, discovers nothing earthshakingly bad about any of the three men and so reports to the the powerful man behind the research committee, the husband of the woman who has engaged her. Relying as always on her moral intuition rather than evidence, it dawns on Isabel while in the act of making her report that she knows who wrote the letter and why. Isabel declines rather prissily, however, to tell the great man doing the search why his wife wants the current headmaster to remain on. Dalhousie hopes instead to herself, charitably, that all adulterers and/or power-mad persons involved will find personal happiness! *** Edinburgh in its day has been famous for its medical men, its moral philosophers, its Presbyterian divines. No more: certainly not the anemic Edinburgh of Isabel Dahousie. A more bloodless, at sea, morally bankrupt cast of boring, effete lost souls may not exist elsewhere in fiction. They bumble about a great city and a country (Scotland) resembling a wee village, where everyone who counts knows or can allegedly find everything needful out about anyone else. And, ostensibly, there is nothing edifying to find or to know. Recommendation: avoid THE CHARMING QUIRKS OF OTHERS. -OOO-