The Right Attitude to Rain

I'm plodding my way through The Right Attitude to Rain, the third in the Sunday Philosophy Club series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith. 'Plodding' is the right word. Some of the prose makes Jane Austen look like a speed-writer. Actually, there are some parallels between the two authors, in that both deal extensively with social convention. Austen always has her tongue in her cheek, but she is still fundamentally positive. Although her characters can be painfully bound (for example, many of her young females seem to spend their lives playing the piano-forte, doing needlework, and waiting for Mr. Right), there's usually some point at which convention works in their favor. Austen challenges prejudice, but she does so with a positive attitude towards convention. It's not convention itself which she finds fault with, just the misappropriation of convention as a means of oppression (okay - usually by men). Austen wants the system to work. Fundamentally, she is a very moral writer; there is nothing of the anarchist in her.


McCall Smith, on the other hand, seems to have a destructive view of convention. His main character, Isabel Dalhousie, claims to be an empiricist, but she is nothing of the sort. She is supposed to be the editor of something called The Review of Applied Ethics. The book contains a number of discussions of ethical problems, usually when Isabel seems to be daydreaming. But the content of these discussions is generally superficial. It feels like she is playing at popular philosophy, as a rank amateur, instead of studying it as a professional.
What is particularly grating is Smith's habit of giving Isabel a hectoring high moral tone in all manner of situations, except when it comes to sexual ethics. It's like reading about a Calvinist Sunday School teacher from the Highlands, who is mortified by an accidental untruth, but who has no qualms about jumping into bed with her niece's ex-boyfriend. The almost total absence of Christian reference is startling, given the context. Isabel lives a very pleasant life in a beautiful, Georgian city (Edinburgh), but she never notices the churches. They have no effect upon her life. Her worldview is drawn from an environment which is not just alien to the Gospel, it is antithetical. The streets she walks along are named after the saints, but all other traces of a common faith are gone.


I don't find Isabel particularly believable. Her grasp of philosophy is too shallow to enable her to be the editor of a prestigious journal. But I do wonder whether she is not more representative of modern Scotland than many of us would care to admit. Just over a hundred years ago, a visiting American evangelist was asked to address an assembly of public school children. During his message he asked, rhetorically, "What is prayer?" and was amazed when the entire school stood and recited the answer to that question as it is formed in the Shorter Catechism. His astonished response was to sugest that they should all thank God for the privilege of having been born in Scotland. Today, the Calvinism that seemed so engrained in the Scottish character is ebbing like Arnold's tide of faith. It leaves a generation of Isabels without the moral compass that could guide them around the rocks of life and the shoals of mortality.
At one point, Isabel meets a lady from whom she wishes to purchase a flat (an apartment). The woman, Florence, is an ex-school teacher. She tells a story (which doesn't really fit into the plot) of a young boy with terminal cancer whom she had taught, and to whom she could offer no hope. Only the school chaplain had been able to reach the boy, because his creed had compelled him to love. Florence tells Isabel that she has tried, but that she cannot believe in God; and yet she longs for a faith that would enable her to share hope. The best that Isabel can do is to point out that she has known athiests who have been capable of expressing love. It's a poor substitute. Either Isabel does not understand the spiritual impulse, or she does not want to understand. So she goes back to her daydreaming and her poetry. Her life is rich, but she is unutterably impoverished. Which just goes to show that the mission field is not restricted to unpronouncable corners of the world; it is also next door; it drinks chardonnay and reads W.H. Auden, but without Christ it is equally lost.