Review by
TOM ADAIRGREAT FORESTS MUST QUIVER IN trepidation each time Alexander McCall Smith approaches his laptop. Not since the exponential output of Isaac Asimov has any serious writer been so prolific. McCall Smith's 50-plu
s titles sell in more languages than Asimov could speak, and are read devotedly.
His fictional landscapes are gently scenic, even the urban ones; his characters are never of the kind you would fear to meet at dead of night on a darkened stair. Even La's Orchestra, with its setting in the uncertainties and privations of the Second World War, provides for the reader a place of safety, of rural routine, quintessentially English, its proprieties in place.
It is a romance – a stand-alone novel with zero likelihood of ever spinning off into another McCall Smith world. The author takes risks. He invests almost all the emotional capital of the book in La herself. She is a greatly impressive heroine, tossed by circumstance and desire. Wooed by her husband when still very young, she is abandoned. His infidelity in the stringent moral world of the 1930s rocks his family, destroys La's contentment and sends her to Suffolk to find her feet.
But first, the author plays games with structure, another brave move. The opening chapter (set, at a guess, in the 1980s) follows two brothers wending nostalgically in their pristine vintage motor car towards the village where La once lived. The lie of the land is coming back to them; they recall the local characters, talk of "La's orchestra"; their identities, though, are concealed. It's a kind of pilgrimage, a journey of verification … the chapter dissolves as La's tale begins.
Her story is never overwrought. It starts in the straight-laced 1930s, moving through England's wartime embattlement into the post-war Atlee rationing years, fetching up at last in Edinburgh at the birth of the swinging 1960s.
The book works best conveying the realms of time and place. The evocation of war-torn England, with its palpable mood of defiance, determination and survival, is beautifully caught. The essence of rural Suffolk routine is captured with relaxed precision, the people – though never fully developed as central characters – being convincing walk-on figures in La's daily life.
As she comes to terms with the slower rhythm of life, taking on work for a local farmer, she makes new friends, among them RAF officer Tim, with whom a platonic friendship develops. From this comes the crucial factor that changes La's life – the appearance of Feliks on the farm. He is a Polish man of great hidden depths, who escaped the Nazis. La's attraction to him is instant.
The other key factor in the plot is Tim's idea of forming a band of local musicians, including airmen from the base, to raise morale. Feliks turns out (is this a coincidence too far?) to be a flautist of some renown – a fact that brings him closer to La as the tale unfolds.
All romances are thrillers – even the quietest. The "will they, won't they" plotline meanders less tensely than it might. Subtle clues are placed to suggest that Feliks may not be who he says he is. And all the time the reader must bear in mind the image of the two men in their vintage Bristol, haunting the village. They imbue a back-ward glancing sense of mystery. Why are they there? Where did they come from? How to they fit in the scheme of La's life?
The third person telling potentially offers the narrative many points of entry into this quiet romantic drama. But – for reasons to do with the secrets Feliks keeps close – we never see the central relationship in the round. It is La's perspective that prevails, her moral courage we grow to admire. We know little more about how Feliks feels than does La herself. And the scale of tragedy, such as it is, derives from her unfulfilled potential. The orchestra comes to stand as a substitute for family. It saves the world twice, as Feliks remarks towards the novel's end, but apart from Tim, its members are left in the shadows.
As love stories go, this is more Brief Encounter than Captain Correlli's Mandolin. La is an excellent recreation of a woman of her time, and as we reach the book's final full stop it becomes essential to return to that cryptic beginning to fully savour the story's resonance and depth.
