In Chance Developments, Alexander McCall Smith has taken five of what he calls “orphaned photographs” – old black and white pictures of people that have survived without any information about their subjects – and based on the photos alone, has imagined a love story around each one. Only with the first story (Sister Flora's First Day of Freedom, which is prefaced with the photo of a woman standing in a shaft of light in a train station) does McCall Smith make a metaphorical connection between the photo and his character (which is nearly ruined when, in the moment, Flora is indeed very aware of the shaft of light and its effect upon her), but in the next four stories, the photos themselves are present in the narratives (in two stories, characters are discussing the people in the photos, in the other two, the reader is present as the photos are taken), and this literal treatment is fairly typical of McCall Smith's unsubtle writing; these stories are not particularly intelligent or interesting; they are certainly not art. This is very light reading, not to my taste, but I have no doubt that McCall Smith's regular readers – of which they are legion – will be charmed by what they find here.
The story Dear Ventriloquist is illustrative of my complaint of literalism. My edition of this book begins with a special “Author's Note to Canadian Readers”, in which McCall Smith explains that he has family ties to Canada and spends much time here. As a result, he had always wanted to set a story in Canada, and when he found an old photo with a man in a Stetson and a vaguely bouldery background, he had found his inspiration. In this photo, the man is kind of sitting on the lap of a woman in Edwardian dress (it looks to me like he's sitting on a boulder with his legs half-draped over her lap, but it's written that he is sitting on it), and if the title of the story hasn't clued you into the story's content, I'll fill it in here: the pair are performers in a circus, and when the woman's trailer burns down – with her ventriloquist's dummy inside – the man (a lion tamer) volunteers to act as the prop in her new act. Hilarious! This lion tamer has only one big cat – William Lion Mackenzie King – and that's such a highly clever play on the name of the contemporaneous Prime Minister of Canada at the time – William Lyon Mackenzie King – that the lion tamer needs to spell out the joke for Eddie (who is actually the protagonist of this story; the photographer rather than the photographed). It is explained to us that Eddie's father is a Quebecker, and when the boy had to correct his father's English once (explaining that “you don't know nothing” is a double negative), Eddie followed that up with “I know it's difficult for you – being French and all...” But that is the only instance of Eddie's father not speaking properly British (as a matter of fact, it annoyed me highly that everyone from this Quebecker to an Aussie to Scotch and Irishmen over the course of these stories would use the fussy phrase “That's as may be”; that struck me as implausible every time I read it). This story could have been set anywhere, so what was the point of stressing its Canadianness? The literal interpretation of the photograph simply shows no art or subtlety; even the love story was predictable.
There was one passage in the above story that might have gotten interesting: Eddie (as a conjurer and fortune teller in the circus) was telling the lion tamer that he knew for a fact that the Prime Minister routinely sought the advice of a fortune teller in Kingston. The lion tamer was taken aback by that, and though he repeated it to the ventriloquist, it came to nothing; what might have added some juice to this plot was just an interesting factoid; and one that all Canadians know anyway. I have the same kind of complaint about the final story, He Wanted to Believe in Tenderness. This story is set in Australia, and as the inspiration photograph shows a man and woman in militaryish garb, McCall Smith propels the action towards the man joining the army at the dawn of WWII. Again, something interesting might have happened: David was shown writing letters to the girl he left behind from his boring deployment in the Pacific when their base was suddenly attacked by the Japanese and he was taken prisoner. But instead of actually showing something interesting like a Japanese POW Camp, McCall Smith jumps ahead to David in a military hospital years later, where he refuses to let anyone see him because he has wasted away to skin and bones. That's so frivolous as to be nearly insulting, and even though I understand that McCall Smith's intention was to focus on the love stories inspired by these photos, the love story that follows this setup was so mawkish as to be nearly insulting. (And I have to admit that I'm confused by the love story too: Before the war, David had fallen in love with a Jewish woman who worried that her father would disown her if she married outside her religion. Yet after the war, in the aftermath of the Holocaust when in my mind their community would have become closer and more interested in preserving what was left of the bloodlines, this Jewish woman was more inclined to abandon her family for David's love. What was McCall Smith's inspiration for adding this unnecessary Jewish angle?)
I am tempted to include passages of the uninspired prose, but as I am working from an advanced reading copy, that's not quite done. This was a very quick, unsatisfying for me, read, but I don't regret spending a couple of hours with it; if only to confirm that I am not a fan of Mr McCall Smith.
I was in the lunch room one day when one of my coworkers at the book store came in, asked me about my weekend, and when I returned the pleasantry of inquiring after his, he told me that he had had a fine weekend attending a writers' retreat. That was interesting enough that I asked him the obvious followups -- Was the weekend about solitary writing time or group exercises? Had he been writing long? Had he ambitions about publishing? -- and while I was primarily asking out of politeness, I wasn't uninterested in his replies. After talking about his weekend for a while (and admitting that he had been told he was good enough to pursue writing professionally), he then pulled some pages out of his briefcase and said that I was welcome to peruse his work. Now that could be sticky, eh?
I couldn't really say no thanks at that point (although, to be fair, he gave me every chance to decline), and as he started before I did, I was left alone with his pages as he exited for the sales floor. Before he left, he explained that he liked to use Humans of New York posts as story prompts, and he routinely uses a photograph and the accompanying one line quote (never using a picture with more than a single line of explanation) to imagine an entire back story for the person. This is not dissimilar to what McCall Smith was doing, and in my coworker's favour is the fact that he wasn't limiting himself to love stories.
So, in the end, I read two of the offered stories before I had to start work myself, and while they weren't wildly inventive, they were both solidly written with clever, ironic slants. And my point is this: McCall Smith's stories don't really rise above the technical level of my amateur coworker (who is a retired school teacher), and I expect more from a high earning professional writer. I was able to genuinely thank my coworker for sharing his work with me, I was able to say that I had enjoyed reading his stories, but I don't know if there's a market for what he's doing (which, naturally, I kept to myself). On the other hand, Alexander McCall Smith is one of the most highly published authors out there...