Everyman's Reviews > 44 Scotland Street

I was lent this book by a friend who insisted that I read it.

I will be clear up front that this isn’t a book I would have chosen on my own, since I primarily read classics and nonfiction. That said, I do see why my friend liked it. I though it was okay, but no more than that.

It was written as a series of daily excerpts in the newspaper The Scotsman, and this shows. The chapters are very short, seldom as long as three pages. In order to keep the reader interested from day to day, the author felt that he had to pack in the events right on top of each other. As a consequence, there is very little space for character development or for descriptions of any kind. In addition, the action, such as it is, hopscotches from one set of characters to another like a bee sipping momentarily from flower after flower, never spending more than a few moments with any one.

The action takes place entirely in a small area of Edinburgh, Scotland, but we never get enough of a description to have any real sense of the places or environment in which events are taking place. Several of the characters live in a rooming house, but we never get to see the house, the street, or much about the interiors of any of the rooms we visit. It’s much like watching a play on a bare stage which has characters dashing in, delivering a few lines, and dashing out again. We don’t get those lovely descriptions that Trollope, for example, gives us that bring characters to light and give us the sense that we would know them if we ran into them in the street; I could walk past any one of the characters in this book with no spark of recognition whatsoever. Nor do we get any real sense of what Scotland Street looks like, nor of the interior of the art gallery where two of the characters work, nor of any other venue in the book. For a book that takes place in a real place, one has to go to Google Street View to get any sense of the environment in which the characters move.

There is some humor, but it’s a muted humor. It’s not the wit of Austen, nor the hilarity of Wodehouse, nor the wry English humor of John Mortimer. It’s humor strained through a screen of cheesecloth.

I found that the book worked best as a bedside book. It isn’t so engrossing that you don’t want to put it down when it’s time to turn out the light. You never have to spend more than a few minutes to get to a convenient stopping point, and never have to stop reading in the middle of a chapter or scene. It isn’t as soporific as, say, Aquinas or Kant, but it is relaxing, intellectually undemanding, and generally restful.

Overall, then, it’s a pleasant enough book. On the Baconian scale of books, it’s a book to be tasted, but more as the peanuts on the bar than as part of a meal. For those readers for whom that’s enough to expect from a book, it’s a fine read. Those who want more from a book are advised to look elsewhere.