Windows To The World

 THE LOST ART OF GRATITUDE


ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

We are first introduced to Isabel Dalhousie in THE SUNDAY PHILOSOPHY CLUB in which she witnesses a young man fall from an upper balcony after a performance of the Reykjavik Symphony in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.  Against the advice of friends and family Isabel feels morally obligated to find out what happened. She often gets involved in things that others consider none of her business.  She has the sense that she has a moral obligation to set certain matters straight if she can. She believes this because she was the last person the young man saw before he died.

 Isabel is a quiet woman of independent means who is in her early forties. She is also a philosopher who edits a journal called The Review of Applied Ethics and she quite often has interior monologues about sticky moral problems that are always very interesting.  She may consider for instance the question of distant wrongs. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us because they are less vivid? Or when one is led to a buffet bar and told to help themselves what exactly does that mean. It doesn’t mean fill a suitcase full of food surely!

As Isabel’s series progresses she moves from juicy dilemma to philosophical quandary and back again. Her personal life moves along as well.  

Motherhood takes up much of her time, but as the owner and publisher of the Review of Applied Ethics, she is quite busy.  When she gets a threatening letter that tries to force her out of the editorial position by two of its previous  quarrelsome directors, Professors Dove and Lettuce,  she has an additional challenge. Isabel finds satisfying ways of dealing with these setbacks with recourse to courts and lawyers.

In THE LOST ART OF GRATITUDE Isabel comes into the sphere once again of Minty Auchterlonie, a highflying financier who runs her own bank. In her past dealings with her Isabel categorized Minty as one of those people to whom the idea of a moral sense seemed to be quite alien. But it has been several years since they have met and they both have small children of about the same age and Isabel wants to suppress the past in thinking that anyone with maternal feelings can’t be as evil as she remembers Minty to be.

Minty manipulates Isabel into a difficult situation that tests her moral courage but she is strong as usual. This is a very strong series that teaches the reader in every book. In this book I learned whom I would save if two people I disliked were in danger of drowning and I could choose only one. Isabel teaches the reader how to approach important problems such as this as well as how to have patience until the next book in the series is available.