Season two starts now! In this premiere episode of the second season of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with Alexander McCall Smith to discuss his philosophical female protagonists and writing multiple series at once.
Here's a fun fact: Bethanne watched the 1981 TV production of Brideshead Revisited on three different continents. In today's episode, she discusses the many adaptations of Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.
Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs lovey for our To Be Read lists. Titles include My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Kureishi, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters.
Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.
The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.
All titles mentioned: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series, 44 Scotland Street Series, Isabel Dalousie Series, The Perfect Passion Company Series by Alexander McCall Smith, The Obelisk Gate, Broken Earth Trilogy,and Great Cities Series by N. K. Jemisin, James by Percival Everett, American Fiction,Colored Television by Danzy Senna, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, Arcadia by Lauren Groff, Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Kureishi, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters.
As always, all of the titles mentioned are up on our Bookshop account: https://bookshop.org/lists/the-book-maven-podcast-book-list-season-2 Use this link to support these authors!
Episode Transcript:
Bethanne: Welcome to season two of the Book Maven, a literary revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first, Alexander McCall Smith, author of the worldwide bestselling Number One Ladies Detective Club series, the 66 Scotland Street books, and the Isabel Dalhousie novels joined me to talk about his expertise, both as a writer, but also in ethics because you might not know this, but Alexander McCall Smith is a doctor of medical ethics and taught for many decades at the University of Edinburgh. Specifically, Smith talks about the important role ethics plays in the development of stories, as well as responsibilities writers have when publishing their stories.
Join us now in conversation as we talk about ethics, when they pertain to Smith's career, and if he applies them differently when he's writing fiction.
Bethanne: You are a more prolific writer than most I know, or many at least, and yet before you were a writer, you had another career as a legal expert on ethics, medical ethics to be precise. I often try to explain to young people that ethics is very important when we're in community. And so, in talking about the ethics of creative writing, do you feel that there are different ethics that you apply to your life as a creative, as someone who writes, and then as someone who publishes.
Alexander McCall Smith: In relation to publishing, there are very specific ethical questions, moral questions, which arise in the process of publishing, or which are about publishing, because of what publishing does. Writing has particular issues that it raises. They're all very similar to the, this is very similar to one another, but there's a different emphasis in the particular field. There are different responsibilities, you could say, which rest on the shoulders of publishers and of writers. Some of the responsibilities are the same, but there will be very particular ones according to the, to which role you're talking about.
Bethanne: So let's talk about the responsibilities of writers. This is something that I find surprises my undergraduates at times because they've never thought of writing as being something that does bear responsibility toward other people. They think of, this is part of our society, they think of books as products on a shelf and some of them love to read, some of them don't, some of them love to write, some of them don't, but they've never considered the fact that the person who tells the stories, who puts them down, actually has some things that they should read. Or shouldn't do.
Alexander McCall Smith: Yes, I think that's right. I think that some people may think of writing as being a very private activity that you sit there and you write, and that's it, and that there's no real effect that is going to be felt elsewhere. But in fact, writing is a form of talking in public. So when you write, you're putting out ideas, you're putting out statements into the world. You, if you write them and you don't publish them, if you just put them in the drawer after you've written them, that's another matter. That's not going to have any impact on anybody. But the moment you publish anything, you are potentially having quite an effect. On the real world having an effect on other people
Bethanne: So the Isabel Dalhousie series as with others but Isabel in particular because she is a philosopher there's so many questions being brought up during the course of a regular life the quotidian for Isabel always triggers thoughts about how we should live and how we should treat other people now of course, as I've said before, you have a lot of professional experience with this.
But I am wondering, when you're writing one of the books about Isabel, do you have particular ideas about this time along she's going to be dealing with love, this time along she's going to be dealing with office politics? Or does it come up for you while you're writing?
Alexander McCall Smith: Sometimes it comes up for me while I'm writing.
But in other cases, before I write the book, for example, one of the Isabel Dalhousie books, I think of issues that she probably is going to address in the books. Something will have caught my attention as raising rather interesting ethical issues, moral problems, and I will deal with it. For example, how we relate to the past is an issue that she often thinks about.
I was having a conversation with somebody recently about the issue of the return of cultural treasures from museums, the issue of whether museums should hand over treasures which have a particular meaning to the country from which they come, that's, of course, a very vexed question in certain contexts.
So that sort of thing, I'll get Isabel talking about that, because I find there's a lot of moral meat in those matters. And on other occasions. An issue will just arise in the course of the writing of the book. She'll be talking to a friend and she may reflect on the problems that particular friend has.
And, uh, we may then find ourselves in a discussion of the, the implications of friendship because friendship is something which plays a very important part in our day to day life. And friendship, of course, raises all sorts of fairly profound, philosophical issues. And if you look at a philosophical discussion of friendship going back to the time of Aristotle, there's a great scene of interesting discussion on the morality of friendship.
So these issues are all around us in our daily lives. And I think people are very responsive to a discussion of those because many people feel these moral problems in their daily life. In the way they treat others in what is expected of them. They're walking down the street, for example, and they find somebody begging, wanting help.
What is, what should one do in those circumstances? Should you walk past? Do you help? That sort of issue? It's all about us all the time.
Bethanne: It is around us all the time, and it's not just in fairly moneyed, privileged Edinburgh with Isabel, it's in Botswana with Mma Ramotswe way of course, and she, if there were ever a philosopher in this world, it is her, it is she, and she is able, and this is what I'm thinking about when you mention the everyday questions of friendship, of how we treat each other, which is why we have columns like the ethicist in the New York Times advice columns. People need all different kinds of levels of ways to think about this. You might, some people might want to read something that's fairly simple. Others want to chew on these topics a bit more, but still others, like your incredible creation, Mma Ramotswe, have very firm, firmly held, ideas about morals and ethics. Can you talk to me a bit about her and how she and Isabel differ or are alike?
Alexander McCall Smith: That raises very interesting questions, Bethanne, because I think that Mma Ramotswe is a bit of a philosopher. She's not a woman who's had a tertiary education. She left school aged about 16 or whatever. But she's a woman of immense wisdom.
She's a very wise woman. She's also a person who very much understands good. And, uh, at various points in talking about her, I describe some of the moral influences in her life, and one in particular is her late father. Who was somebody, obviously, to whom she was very close, and she talks about how he was a good kind man, that he understood the traditional morality of Botswana, and she often refers to that.
She talks about the old Botswana ways. So she turns to, um, the past of her people, and to the accumulated wisdom of that particular nation, in matters of how you should behave. And she says at one or two points, If you look at the old Botswana morality, it provides all the answers to us. So that's one, one approach.
And of course, she's, she's right. Because in those old codes of behavior are some very deep and important principles of morality that I think we'd all sign up for. So that's where she does it. She's a woman of great sympathy. And of course, many people hold the view that sympathy for others or empathy with others is a very important component in how we, how we relate morally to them and how we behave.
She has those sources available to her. Now, Isabel Dalhousie, who is the heroine of a series that I write, set in Edinburgh, she is a professional philosopher. She approaches problems in a rather different way, in that she will have a theoretical approach to them. She will understand very well the basis on which somebody like Kant, for example, would approach a moral issue.
She's familiar with the writings of all these known philosophers. So she does a rather more theoretically based morality. I think that she doesn't always get it right. Whereas Mma Ramotswe would get it right.
Bethanne: I love that!
Alexander McCall Smith: And Isabel, I think can end up, and she might end up, actually finally opting for the very common sense, intuitive morality that Mma Ramotswe embodies.
So they're both, both those women are philosophers. They're doing different sorts of philosophy, but it fits the circumstances of both of them.
Bethanne: It does. And I'm just realizing too, that these different books, including the other, one of the other series that I just adore is 44 Scotland Street and talk about quotidian day to day ethics and different ages interacting. This must be so much fun for you to be able to take these things and in one place, as you say, have a very wise and good woman, another place have a very, very academic and privileged woman, in another place to have parents and children, and it's no wonder you're able to write four or five books a year, because I'm not saying that this is pure play–it is a lot of work, but it must be work that at times feels like play for you.
Alexander McCall Smith: Yes. It's tremendous fun. I love writing. I suspect that most people who write get great pleasure from it. I love the conversations that I have with my characters, and I love getting my characters to wrestle with moral problems. Even the dogs. I've got a dog. In the Scotland Street series called Cyril, and he belongs to Angus Lordie. And Cyril is the only dog in Scotland with a gold tooth. And Cyril has moral problems. His big moral problem is that his big temptation, I suppose, is that he wants to bite. The ankles of one of the other characters, and he sits there. So we see Cyril wrestling with this very canine temptation to nip the ankles of one of the other characters who's got particularly nippable ankles. And Cyril thinks, Cyril thinks I better not do it because if I do it, I'll be walloped by my owner with a rolled up newspaper and he rises to the challenge. He manages. In his rather strange canine way, he manages to deal with that temptation. I get great pleasure from that. And also, I think, when I write about the young characters in the Scotland Street series, there's a character called Bertie–
Bethanne: Bertie is one of my favorites.
Alexander McCall Smith:He's a lovely, lovely little boy who's seven years old. He's got a terribly pushy mother, very pushy mother. And Bertie has all sorts of moral issues that his little life has to deal with, there's a very bossy girl at school called Olive, who says that Bertie's going to have to marry her when they're 20. And how does he deal with that? So these issues are all about us.
Bethanne: I do not want to take up too much more of your day in Edinburgh, but I do want to ask, since the great Hippopotamus Hotel, another Mma Ramotswe came out last October. And what is the next Alexander McCall Smith book we have to look forward to?
Alexander McCall Smith: Uh, I think the next one will be volume two of my new series, the Perfect Passion Company was the first volume in that series, the second one Looking For You is about a marriage bureau in Edinburgh, an introductions bureau in Edinburgh. As I say, the first book was published last year, second one coming out shortly in, in New York. And I'm having great fun with that because once again, one can bring in all sorts of aspects of people's lives when they go to this marriage bureau introductions agency and say, I want you to help me to find a partner. Then we can see various aspects of their lives. We can see where they've been going wrong, where they might have something to offer and so on. It's good territory from that point of view.
Bethanne: It is. And what do we, are you calling it the Perfect Passion Series or
Alexander McCall Smith: Probably the Perfect Passion Company series. It's something which I'm enjoying greatly.
Bethanne: Thank you, Sandy, for joining us this week. You can find all of Alexander McCall Smith's books wherever books are sold. Now let's move on to Friday Reads where we'll see what you've been reading this week.
Welcome back to our regular segment on Friday Reads posts from around the socials. This season we decided to highlight fewer posts and dig a little deeper for you into the titles that are shared. Please let us know if you like this new format, as always, my engineer and producer, Jordan is here to help. Jordan, what's our first book?
Jordan: At first, we've got a post from Nicole. It's a picture of what she's reading. It's the Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin, and she is reading it on an e reader.
Bethanne: You know, a great fact about N. K. Jemisin is she is one of the most acclaimed sci fi fantasy writers in the U. S. And it's her perspective as a black woman that informs the world building in her works, including the Broken Earth trilogy, which is very well known.
And her newest trilogy, Great Cities and The Obelisk Gate is book two in the broken earth trilogy, and it focuses on a supercontinent known as the stillness that every few years has disastrous fifth seasons that cause all kinds of climate, you know, uh, chaos. So. I think it's fantastic. I recommend the entire trilogy.
And it's for fans of anyone from the great Ursula K. Le Guin, to Anne Leckie, to Nisi Shawl, who writes incredible Afrofuturism, and dare I say, novelist Erika Swyler, whose newly released We Lived on the Horizon approaches worldbuilding in a Jamesonian manner that combines high concept places with big questions about how to live.
So what do we have next, Jordan?
Jordan: Up next, we've got from Suzanne MC. It's an image of a book jacket that is everywhere right now. We're talking about James by Percival Everett.
Bethanne: So this book jacket is so striking. And 2024, was it? Big year for Everett, okay? So we have the film American Fiction, based on his novel, and he also released this novel, James, and his wife, Danzy Senna, released Colored Television.
Those both are on all kinds of prize lists. It's pretty crazy. James, in case you've been under a rock, is winning accolades as a fierce retelling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Only this time, the narrator isn't Huck. It's the fully named Jim of the original. He's called James because he is a person who is able to say, this is my preference.
Everett not only gives James his full name and a full existence, but the writing is so original and dynamic. You might forget about Twain altogether. It is for fans of Percival Everett himself, I highly recommend The Trees, and people who love literary retellings like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea or Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead.
Let's not forget incredible African American writers like Toni Morrison. Colson Whitehead and Paul Beattie. One more, Jordan, do we have time?
Jordan: Definitely time for one more. Um, this one is from M. H. Faith Brown. It's an article from the New York Times. It's about Dorothy Allison, the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, who passed away at 75.
Bethanne: Unfortunately, we lost the great Dorothy Allison last November. But she will not soon be forgotten. Her work has inspired more than one generation of readers and writers, especially those who identify as LGBTQ, because she addressed issues of sexual orientation, child abuse, and class struggle with honesty and compassion.
Bastard Out of Carolina is a semi autobiographical novel narrated by Ruth Ann Bone Boatwright, who is sexually abused by her stepfather, Glenn Waddell. It was named as one of the 136 Best American Novels by The Atlantic in 2024. This is a book, if you haven't read it yet, and many of you already have, that I think is great for fans of Lauren Groff's Arcadia, Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here, Stone Feinberg, Jeanette Winterson, Rita Mae Brown, so many more. It is an absolute masterpiece, masterwork. I hate using the word master when we're talking about women. It is a superb novel.
It may have taken us half an episode to address it, but it does happen to be the week of Valentine's Day. And that got me thinking of a classic work that deals in romance above and below the surface. In today's Pop Goes the Culture, we'll discuss the romantic lives in Brideshead Revisited and the zig zagging love life of its author as well.
Here’s a weird humblebrag: I’ve watched the 1981 TV production of “Bridehead Revisited” on three different continents. Back in the day, I swooned over Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons in the roles of Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, the protagonists of Evelyn Waugh’s iconic family saga, when it ran on Masterpiece Theater–like all good bookish girls. In 1982, I watched the entire series again while I visited family in Australia. Finally, in 1988 London, a friend and I watched this fairy tale of the British aristocracy on VHS tape.
“Brideshead” had a real cultural moment in the 1980s, which was the right time for it, too. Allow me to explain, and just imagine I’m holding a teddy bear named Aloysius, like Sebastian did, the entire time.
Evelyn Waugh, born 1903, was educated in relative privilege at a prep school and then Oxford University. He was gay and had many affairs with men, but perhaps in modern terms he was bi–he fell in love with and married Evelyn Gardner (they were known as “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn” to friends) in 1927; the marriage was over in 1929 and annulled in 1933. After converting to Catholicism, he married Laura Herbert in 1937, and had seven children. The 20th-century British criminalization of homosexuality affected his peers like W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, but Waugh got to have his cake and eat it, too.
At first Waugh considered the 1945 “Brideshead Revisited” his finest work. Nota Bene: the book’s entire title is “Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,” just in case a reader isn’t clear about who’s narrating the mischegoss. Yes, I said mischegoss; it’s a messy plot. Waugh tosses Catholicism, aristocracy, casual crushes and serious love affairs, bitter rivalry, the road to global conflict, late-stage alcoholism, and more into the air. A few of those ideas land with distinct thuds, today.
First, given Waugh’s conversion, we can expect his sympathies to lie with the Flytes and their grand estate complete with a grand chapel for the sacraments. Lord Marchmain (keep up, those aristos have surnames and hereditary names) may have abandoned the faith and his family, but Lady Marchmain, son Bridey, and daughter Cordelia maintain lugubrious enthusiasm for masses and confessions. Yes, Evelyn, we know: Since the Protestant Reformation, England’s Catholic uppercrust has had to contend with second-class status. The poor Flytes, consigned to their nearly 9,000 acres.
Second–I do enjoy using Yiddish terms while discussing this book–Waugh keeps schtum about the relationship between Sebastian and Charles. Yet, in the adaptations, actors like Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons or Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw or Andrew Garfield and Joe Alwyn lean in to their evident heat and lust (hey, it’s the lost Merchant-Ivory masterpiece!).
The soundtrack to the post-sexual-revolution, AIDS-epidemic 1980s was filled with sexual ambiguity and confusion, except for Morrissey, who was only morally ambiguous. Queer culture was less culturally accepted than today, and Waugh’s faith still bans love outside of cishet, deity-sanctioned marriage. The repressed desire, as well as the era’s Anglophilic tendencies, made the on-screen “Brideshead” crackle with electricity, although that might just have been my family’s aging television set.
Third, Sebastian turns into the shadow self of Waugh, the classic self-hating gay man, as well as the classic self-hating aesthete. His drinking spirals further and further out of control and he eventually winds up in Tunisia, eking out a life by doing small errands for a Catholic monastery. His death doesn’t even get announced; it’s simply assumed, after Cordelia visits and sees the state of him. How. . . convenient. Charles can turn his romantic attentions to Lady Julia, then a bloodless marriage to a woman named Celia, then Julia again, and so on and so on and Scooby-Dooby-Doo. Different strokes for different folks!
We’ve seen Julian Jarrold’s and Luca Guadagnino’s versions of “Brideshead.” I’d love to see Emerald Fennell’s or Greta Gerwig’s or Anna Paquin’s versions, not so that they might skew Waugh’s heaving ocean liner of a novel feminist in ways the author himself would disdain, but so they at least might show us how the author’s forms of disdain, as well as forms of compassion, affect the female characters.
As the characters in Brideshead Revisited deal with love burning under the surface, and author Evelyn Waugh explored his own sexuality within England's societal confines of the time, we wanted to take a look at some novels that talk about love under the radar.
We are back with another Six Recs. a themed book list and this time the theme is love under the radar. So I am going to give you six recs and some info about those. But we do have a little gamification aspect. I'm going to see if I can give six recommendations in three minutes or less. As usual, my faithful engineer Jordan is here with a stopwatch to see if I can make it.
And of course, if I don't, You know, we know the bookshelf will come tumbling down. So, Jordan, are you set?
We are rolling.
Thank you. My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Kureishi is set in 1980s staturite London with all of its class and money issues. And race and class come between two male lovers, one of whom runs this small laundrette, a family place.And it, the adaptation with Daniel Day Lewis was excellent. I recommend seeing that film.
Next up is Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell and this time we're in England but it's the 1500s and we're with Will Shakespeare and his wife and their children. One of those children, Hamnet, is going to have some problems and ultimately this one is about the real love that stays in a long marriage despite tragedy. So check it out.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer is one of the finest. comic novels of the 21st century. And the protagonist, Mr. Less, seems hapless, but at the same time is a very smart and very sophisticated man. It's poignant, it's winsome, it's hilarious and honest, and it's about a gay man seeking both love and professional ambitions.
Next up is one of my favorite novels from 1986. We're back in England again, sorry, Rachel Ingalls wrote a novel about a lonely English housewife falling in love with a sea monster named Larry. It got enormous critical acclaim when it came out but not huge readership and I think everyone should give it a try, it's wildly strange and terrifically wise. (Mrs. Caliban)
Next we have The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. This is an alternate history. the United States, but with very few white people involved. It's technically the story of one family, foregrounded by a young woman named Ailey Pearl Garfield's research, um, in the here and now. And the love songs are interstitials that illuminate the family's journey through time. It is one of my all time favorite novels to recommend.
Finally, Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters is an amazing and very contemporary novel. about pregnancy and parenting between people with complicated gender identities. What does a modern family look like? And even more important, how does it work? So this book is about romantic love, platonic love, parental love, and community love.
Highly recommended. There we go. Jordan, how did I do?
You came in at two minutes and 45 seconds. So a good start to the season.
It is! I'm Just thrilled, so look forward to hearing what you all think about those books if you read them, and thanks as ever, Jordan
Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven, a literary revue, is produced and hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's also produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.
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