Customer Reviews

Sunday Philosophy Club (Dalhousie 1)

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(45)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(38)

 

 

I read this book without having read any of the author's prior books. I know that some have remarked that this was boring or slow but I found it to be neither of these things. I was thoroughly entertained by it. I loved Isabel's mind--which is why I found it so difficult to understand the ending and how she came about feeling the way she did. I won't spoil the ending but I will say that it leaves one with an utterly unending need to discuss the philosophy of justice. Throughout the book I felt as though I were watching "Murder She Wrote" with a younger woman in the lead. Isabel is profound, comical and thought-provoking. All of the characters are well-rounded and completely believable. I can't say enough good things about this book. It's hard to find well-written books that are profound, entertaining and suspenseful--read it and discuss it with your friends.

It seems to matter not how much I celebrated AM Smith's work or how often in re-reading any of his Botswana tales, I reveled in the homogeneity of his crafted prose and the perfected simplicity of his character's emotions, none of this translated into an appreciation for The Sunday Philosophy Club.

The characters are still clean, crisp and open to the reader's inspection, but the prose is much too languid.

Worse, though, the writer just couldn't seem to keep his mitts off the story and leave it to the reader to find his way through. I had to put the book down and walk away with each interruption. And so obsequious! I kept feeling him, peering over my shoulder, asking "Did you get that," or "Wasn't that clever of me?"

Now, mind, I do reciprocate Mr. Smith's concern for dwindling ethics, civility and taste; but that's better left to a book where I choose to read his thoughts on that subject, it's simply not germane to a yarn preoccupied with Isabel, busily poking her nose into other people's business.

Mr. Smith also seems to suffer from what I call the English Mystery Writer's syndrome. Ninety percent of the energy and craft go into the opening and build of the story; then, as the writer nears the end of his prescribed length, he slaps up a climax and conclusion with apparent disdain for the reader's investment in the story or the characters. I am certain he can do much better.

Harsh, yes. But it's the reaction of a loyal, avid reader of a very competent wordsmith who's gone off the rails for a bit. I can only imaging what Grace might have said, if she were asked.

I'll try one more, but mind the gap!

Isabel Dalhousie is a quiet, refined lady philosopher. One night at a concert a young man falls to his death,apparently accidentaly, but Isabel suspects otherwise and sets out to find out the truth. She is helped some of the time by her niece, who has a hunky new boyfriend. Isabel does not understand the appeal of hunks, which tells you all you need to know about Isabel. She likes her niece's former boyfriend, who also helps her in in her investigations.

This is a quite pleasant but unmemorable mystery story with a rather lame ending. Isabel is not nearly as interesting a character as Mma Ramotswe, and the story generally lacks the charm and humour of the Botswana-set No. 1 Ladies series. Rather disappointing.

I bought this book because I loved the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of books by this author. Unfortunately, this book lacks the charm of those books, and the main character (Isabel Dalhousie) isn't nearly as interesting as Mma Ramotswe. In fact, I found her to be rather boring, bordering on unlikeable. The supposed "Sunday Philosophy Club" is only mentioned once or twice, and the members (if there are any- maybe it's a figment of her imagination) are never even introduced! The ending was extremely anti-climatic, and to get there, you have to wade through boring philosophical musings that rarely have anything much to do with the subject matter or plot (what little there is of it). I really wanted to like this book, and I tried, but McCall Smith missed the mark on this one. I hope he goes back to writing the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books.

Alexander McCall Smith, author of the tremendously successful and utterly enthralling series that began with "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," has written a new novel set in Edinburgh. "The Sunday Philosophy Club" features Ms. Isabel Dalhousie, a graduate of Cambridge and an independently wealthy woman of forty. Isabel lives in a beautiful home, and her routine basically consists of working on her daily crossword puzzle, attending cultural events, visiting her beloved niece, Cat, and editing philosophical articles for "The Review of Applied Ethics."

One evening, Isabel is attending a performance by the Reykjavik Symphony in Usher Hall, when a man suddenly tumbles down from the top tier to his death. Isabel is traumatized by this unexpected tragedy and she resolves to find out if the victim, Mark Fraser, was pushed or fell accidentally.

Isabel noses into Mark's personal and professional life, and she discovers that his death may be related to some financial chicanery in his firm. In addition, Isabel finds the time to interfere in her niece's romantic life. Cat is seeing a young man named Toby, a hunk whom Isabel dislikes and mistrusts. She is determined to break up this relationship and bring about a reconciliation between Cat and her former boyfriend, Jamie, whom Isabel adores.

"The Sunday Philosophy Club" is a pedestrian effort featuring a pretentious busybody who has far too much time on her hands. The mystery that Isabel investigates is uninvolving and the solution is anticlimactic. Although the Edinburgh setting is colorful, the book, as a whole, lacks the charm, warmth, and psychological depth that made "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" so delightful and satisfying.

If your interests are limited to mystery books, nothing else, this book is not for you.
I initially bought this book because of the title, thinking that we would have a female version of Her Professor Dr Dr (Hon.) Moritz-Maria von Igenfeld, the Pninish uberscholar philologist who wrote the seminal Portugese Irregular Verbs ("after which there was nothing left to discuss about the subject, Nothing."). I was curious to see how he would present a female version of such scholar.
He did not. Nor was it a detective story, although there is an element of suspense. This book is about Applied Ethics, a subject about which the author seems to know a bit. It also makes you feel like leading a quite thinking life in Edinburgh.
I don't want to spoil the story but I felt that I was reading a detective story until I realized what it was...

I tried to like this book. I like all the "No 1 Ladies Detective Agency" books and hoped this would be equally enjoyable. Unfortunately, the protagonist is not nearly as charming. She is a highly educated woman and we must sit through every single nuance of a thought that she has before she arrives at a sensible conclusion. This is intended to be "philisophical" but it is tedious and overwrought. Furthermore the story and conclusion are disappointing. I expected better.

I give 1-star ratings to books I can't finish or are so dull I have to speed-read through them to get to the end (I hate to leave any book unread once I've started it). Unfortunately, this book falls into this category.

I found this book delightful! I liked and identified with the main character, Isabel Dalhousie, especially as she sought to do the right thing even when all others advised her against any action. The book opens with Isabel attending a concert and a young man falls from the balcony of the concert hall to his death. It is ruled an accident but something keeps nagging at Isabel that there was more to it than that. Isabel uses her talent as a philospher to help her uncover the truth behind the young man's death.

The characters in the book are amusing, self-centered, and true-to-life in many ways. Isabel is a well drawn character with real flaws as are the other major characters in this novel. The writing is very detailed which made me feel like I was actually in Edinburgh. Isabel was my favorite character of course but her housekeeper Grace comes in second. What a delight it was to hear what came from Grace's mouth.

This book is not as light or easy as his Ladies' Detective Agency books but it is a wonderful read nonetheless. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I look forward to reading his second book in this series.

In his new mystery series, Alexander McCall Smith has moved a long way from his comfort zone --- nearly 6,000 miles in fact, a number that represents the distance from Gaborone, Botswana to Edinburgh, Scotland. Botswana, as many readers surely know, is the setting for Smith's immensely popular No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series while Edinburgh is home to Smith's latest undertaking, THE SUNDAY PHILOSOPHY CLUB, billed as an "Isabel Dalhousie mystery."

Isabel Dalhousie, a quiet woman of independent means and a certain age, seems an unlikely gumshoe. As the editor of The Review of Applied Ethics, Isabel would seem more at home in a university philosophy department than dealing with the sordid details of murder most foul. But we, as Isabel would certainly agree, do not always choose our circumstances; at times they choose us.

In Isabel's case, circumstances cause her to witness an unfortunate death, a young man's fall from a symphony hall balcony. "Her first thought, curiously, was of Auden's poem on the fall of Icarus. Such events, said Auden, occur against a background of people going about their ordinary business. They do not look up and see the boy falling from the sky. I was talking to a friend, she thought. I was talking to a friend and the boy fell out of the sky." Isabel decides she has a moral duty to investigate the circumstances of the young man's death, being as she would have been the last person he saw before his death.

The trail winds her through the worlds of Scottish art and high finance before she reaches a conclusion. Along the way Isabel is confounded by a bushel of moral dilemmas. Does she have a duty to speak truthfully to a reporter who is bent on exploiting the grief of the victim's family? Should she expose an unfaithful boyfriend to a family member? And ultimately, once she discovers the truth of the situation, what should she do with that knowledge?

Isabel's progress can be slightly ponderous at times. Deciding whether or not she should even act at all takes up nearly the first 100 pages of Isabel's story, and since the book weighs in at only 247 pages, that's a high percentage of inaction. Once Isabel finally does decide to get involved, the story picks up and Smith provides more than enough red herrings to keep the reader guessing until the very end. Since Isabel is a philosopher at heart, she tends to analyze each and every situation from a philosophical perspective. "There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one. Isabel had herself written a short article on the matter, following the publication of Sissela Bok's philosophical monograph, Lying. She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to the matter..." The tone is a bit daunting for readers who never progressed beyond Philosophy 101 in college.

Once one adjusts to the tone, it is easy to warm to THE SUNDAY PHILOSOPHY CLUB. Isabel has quite a cast of characters orbiting around her. Her opinionated (the less charitable among us might say bossy) housekeeper Grace, her self-sufficient niece Cat, and Cat's ex-boyfriend Jamie will hopefully all return in subsequent books. Smith does a wonderful job of imparting a sense of place along with the characters. Edinburgh, with all its quirks and charms, shines brightly throughout the novel. Fans of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective series should easily be able to take these Scottish characters into their hearts as easily as they did the ones in Botswana.

--- Reviewed by Shannon Bloomstran

I was excited to read another series by Alexander McCall Smith but was disappointed. The character development is as well done as in his Number One Ladies Detective series. The plot is well laid out but the story is so slow moving! It also seems that some of the main characters' thought processes/patterns are repetitive. One would expect a better editing job given the way his other writings are. I won't be bothering with other Sunday Philosophy Club stories.