Precious Defeats Entropy

These days reading has to compete with many other forms of entertainment, and readers can be a fickle lot. It is a rare thing for a writer to keep a large audience engrossed in the doings of the same set of characters for a period of more than a few years.

Yet that is exactly what Alexander McCall Smith has achieved with his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Recently released, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party is the twelth novel in a series begun in 1998.

I have read all of the books in McCall Smith's series, and yet I confess to feeling somewhat dissatisfied with them. Like many before it, nothing much happens in the latest entry. The crime Precious investigates is pretty straightforward, and the over-arching character storylines are progressed at a glacial pace.

While reading the latest book, I began to wonder why I first got interested in these novels, and what keeps me coming back. I realised that, in reality, the first novel is a very different beast from its successors.

All of these books are about the same length, at around 250-275pp. In the first novel, McCall Smith needed to establish his characters' backstories. As a result, it packed in a lot. The author introduces us to Botswana, many of us for the first time. He gives us the story of Precious's father and his death, her disastrous marriage to Note, the loss of a baby, her introduction to JLB and Mma Makutse, and her struggles to establish her own business in a sexist society.

That's a lot of incident for a 275pp novel, which surely helped it to become such a hit. Yet none of its successors have been remotely like that. Instead they are quite uneventful, and filled with discursions into small matters, and fond recallings of incidents and characters from the early novels that readers are perfectly familiar with and don't need reminding of. McCall Smith seems to just let his characters muse for a bit about Botswana or their childhoods when he has run out of ideas for advancing his plot. It's not a good look to have multiple occurrences of pure padding in a 250pp novel.

Ongoing storylines such as the awkward romance between Precious and JLB, Mma Makutse's wedding and the apprentices' maturing as young men are played out agonisingly slowly over many novels, issued over a period of more than a decade in real life. It is 13 years since we first met Charlie, for example, and McCall Smith has scarcely bothered to develop his character at all. It is the best part of a decade since we observed the first encounter of Phuti and Grace. How is it that McCall Smith's audience is so accepting of sparse plots and a chronic lack of character development?

The answer is that these books are not crime novels but a celebration of the mundane and ordinary. Can anyone really claim to have been enthralled by a plot twist in one of these "detective" stories? That is not what they are really about. Readers identify with the slow pace of life and the detailed focus on everyday matters such as shopping for shoes, drinking tea and the love of a car. They are happy to read the author's endless and repetitive discursions about it. There is comfort in the familiar.

Most long series of books eventually succumb to a form of entropy, where the author and/or the readers simply lose interest. Eventually only fervent completists stay with the series. If we don't see characters developing then they start to become two-dimensional and we lose interest. You would usually expect that the appetite an audience might have for any long series must dwindle over time.

McCall Smith seems to have come up with a premise that works boredom and mundanity into the very fabric of these novels, and makes it part of their appeal. In doing so, he has locked in a vast audience that cares more about the discursions in his novels than for the plots.

There is every reason to believe that McCall Smith's readership will stay with his characters for as long as he is capable of tapping out his annual dose of Botswanan banality.