Tim O'Hare

I recently finished reading “The World According To Bertie”, the fourth book in Alexander McCall Smith’s “44 Scotland Street” series. These books are interesting for the way that they are constructed – McCall Smith wrote the first one (I’m not sure about the subsequent ones) as a serial in The Scotsman newspaper, with each short chapter appearing in print on successive days. So, the books are made up a lots of short chapters about four pages at a time which build through the book to tell the stories of a whole series of individual characters who sometimes interact but are often only loosely inter-related. Bertie, of this book’s title is a highly intelligent six year old boy with an insufferable “new age” mother and a put-upon father but although the book carries his name he features no more than the other half dozen or so characters that McCall Smith has introduced through the series.

I enjoyed this book less than the others in the series – perhaps the format and the character is getting a little tired – but I do think it is a clever way of putting together a book that has wide appeal. It’s inevitable that each reader will have one or two characters who they are more interested in and with a wide range of characters its hard not to be drawn to someone in the story. I think that in this particular case one or two of the less interesting and more irritating (to me) characters get more “page-time” which is probably why I didn’t enjoy it so much. It’ll be interesting to see whether McCall Smith does a fifth one in the series or whether he too is getting tired of the format – some of the plot twists and resolutions did seem a bit forced as if this might be the last one.

Last night I finished reading Francis Wheen’s book “How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World“. This is a book by Guardian journalist Wheen that sets out to explore how modern thinking has been taken over by irrational and ill-supported ideas and frameworks. I picked it up in my local Oxfam shop and thought it looked like the kind of book I might enjoy; the cover claims that it is “hilarious” and there are other reviews that describe it as “entertaining” and “amusing”. I didnt really find much to laugh at in it and rather plodded through it, not exactly not enjoying it but certainly not lapping it up with gusto. I guess it required a bit more political knowledge than I possess and so I probably didn’t get all of the points it was trying to make. Still, there were some interesting part (I can’t remember any detail about what they were though…) and it certainly stretched my brain into areas that it doesn’t normally go why can’t be a bad thing.

Last night I finished reading “Fighter Boys” by Patrick Bishop, the very well written and thoroughly research account of how RAF Fighter Command won the battle for the skies over Britain in the summer of 1940 (the period commonly referred to as the Battle of Britain). The book is based on diaries, letters and records kept by various fighter pilots at the time and with interviews with surviving family members. It’s a fascinating read that left me wondering whether it would be beneficial for every young person in the country to read this book and to discover more about the fortitude and resilience shown by everyone involved in the efforts to defend British shores from German attack. I’m a bit of a sucker for old planes going back to childhood days building Airfix models but I didn’t properly know the history and when it is written down like this, with real people and real memories it hits home quite hard. So often you find yourself reading about the exploits of such-and-such a pilot only to end the paragraph with a short sharp sentence noting when and how they were killed. Sad, uplifting, interesting and challenging in equal measure this is a great read – perhaps a little on the long side, but then those who fought off the enemy forces day after day would also have enjoyed a little more brevity and they didn’t have any choice…