标题：Corduroy Mansions
基本信息
副标题:A Novel
作者: Alexander Mccall  Smith
内容简介
A delightful new setting--London--a delightful new cast of characters, and one incredibly clever dog. Corduroy Mansions is the affectionate nickname given to a genteel, crumbling mansion block in London's vibrant Pimlico neighborhood, and the home turf of a new cast of captivating, quirky, and altogether McCall-Smithian characters. There's the middle-aged wine merchant William, who's trying to convince his reluctant twenty-four-year-old son, Eddie, to leave the nest; and Marcia, the restaurant propriatrix who has her sights set on William. There's also the (justifiably) much-loathed member of Parliament, Oedipus Snark; his mother, Berthea, who's writing his biography and loathing every minute of him; and his long-suffering girlfriend, Barbara, a literary agent who would like to be his wife (but, then, she'd like to be almost anyone's wife). There's the vitamin evangelist, the psychoanalyst, the art student with a puzzling boyfriend, and the Pimlico terrier, Freddie de la Haye, who can fasten his own seat belt and is almost certainly the only avowed vegetarian canine in London. The comings and goings, the face-to-face and behind-the-back meetings and misses, the in and outs of neighborliness in all its unexpected variations--here is a new world for us to enter, filled with all the life, laughter, and humanity that we have come to expect from Alexander McCall Smith.
Book Reviews
tween September 2008 and February 2009, there was a cosy corner of telegraph.couk in which readers could take refuge from the reports of greedy financiers and warring nations. Over 20 weeks, Alexander McCall Smith created a parallel world in which a cast of mostly likeable, fallible characters tried to do the right thing by their neighbours. A world in which, once a problem was identified, the emphasis was placed on finding a solution and not on establishing blame. A world in which we were invited to take seriously our responsibility to others, then have a giggle at life’s absurdities.
right thing by their neighbours. A world in which, once a problem was identified, the emphasis was placed on finding a solution and not on establishing blame. A world in which we were invited to take seriously our responsibility to others, then have a giggle at life’s absurdities.
And now, for all those who missed it online, the 100 instalments of McCall Smith’s Corduroy Mansionshave been collected into one complete novel. At the hub of the gently paced action is a four-storey building in Pimlico, London, “built in the early 20th century, in a fit of Arts and Crafts enthusiasm”. The mansion block’s homely architecture reflects the era of neighbourly courtesy in which it was designed. So, unlike most modern city dwellers, the inhabitants of Corduroy Mansions still converse politely when they meet on the stairs.
William French is a widowed, 51-year-old wine merchant, struggling to get his unemployed, 24-year-old son Eddie to leave the nest. On the floor below live four young women: Dee works in a health food shop; Caroline is studying art history at Sotheby’s; Jenny is an MP’s PA; Jo, an Australian, is assistant manager at a local wine bar. Below them lives a quiet accountant in his mid-forties called Basil Wickramsinghe, who ensures that there are always freshly cut flowers in the building’s hallway. The loosely interwoven lives of Corduroy Mansions’ inhabitants reach out to bring quirkier personalities into the narrative, including a practitioner of Sacred Bulgarian Dance, the world’s nastiest Liberal Democrat MP, a literary agent obsessed with his old boarding school and a small, vegetarian dog with a taste for 17th-century French art.
As with all his fiction – be it set in the Botswana of his best-selling No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books or the Edinburgh of The Sunday Philosophy Club series – McCall Smith gives his characters a series of modern, moral dilemmas to work through. In this case we’re asked to consider how a heterosexual woman might advise a gay man (to whom she’s attracted) if he suspects he might like girls after all? We ponder the correct choice of wine to take to dinner parties, based on the relative age and income of host and guest. How quickly should one suggest cohabitation to a new lover? How much can one justify spending on footwear? Is it ever appropriate to suggest colonic irrigation?
Occasionally, McCall Smith’s duty to weigh each question seriously causes a character to sound unconvincing. So although it is likely an art student would consider the value of quotidian beauty relative to the kind created by an artist, it seems less likely she’d say things like, “If everything was beautiful, did that not deprive beauty of all its aesthetic and, indeed, moral force?” This is language better suited to the mature philosophy journal editor, Isabel Dalhousie, of McCall Smith’s Edinburgh novels.
Anyway, the seriousness is always sugar dusted with McCall Smith’s delight in the ridiculous and his perfectly paced humour. While he’s an author who clearly believes most people are decent at heart, he’s not above creating a character so loathsome that we cheer on as the villain’s mother plans an unauthorised biography of him and later, tipsily, fantasises about electrocuting him.
Several narrative threads are left untied at the end. And since McCall Smith has always treated his characters like old friends – dropping in regularly to see what they’re up to – I’m sure we can expect to hear more from these charming Pimlicites. 
Corduroy Mansions
by Alexander McCall Smith