Alexander McCall Smith “At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances”
Can a book with such a wonderfully quirky title be in any way bad? I’m sad to say, yes it can. This one certainly is. Bad, that is. Abysmally so, in my eyes. This book is by far the most un-funny and boring book I have read in quite a long while (and with the “luck of the pick” I had this year so far, this says something.)
I wanted to read this book, only because there is an audio version of it and its 2 sequels read by Hugh Laurie. The audio version of another book (Three Men in a Boat), read by Hugh Laurie, is one of my all-time favorites and was one of the reasons I developed a taste for audiobooks at all. And P.G. Wodehouse’s wonderful, fantastic, extremely funny Jeeves & Wooster novels I discovered through a recommendation from Hugh Laurie, so to speak (he is a huge fan). So I had high hopes for this book as well.
Sadly, they were dashed to pieces within the first couple of pages. Luckily the book has only 126 pages in total, so my suffering didn’t take all too long. If it wasn’t for a doctor’s appointment and the inevitable wait involved in it, I wouldn’t even have bothered finishing those paltry 126 pages.
Hugh Laurie might have enjoyed the story because he went to Cambridge himself once upon a time, but I just found it tedious in the extreme. There are certainly many ways to poke fun at academics, at Germans, at pretty much everything – and there probably are loads of books that manage to do this admirably. This one? Not at all.
The plot is ridiculous (and not in a good way), the characterization is none-existent, all the characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is cringe-worthy and the overall writing style is just … well, sleep-inducing is one way to put it. It’s just as bad as this Ladies Detective Agency drivel by the same author.
That’s a pity, because usually I enjoy nothing more than people making fun of Germans. And academics in their ivory towers. And university politics. Well, actually politics in general is a topic I can’t take seriously at all, so making fun of it is the only thing to do with it, really. But this book, though it had two or three single lines that were marginally funny, is definitely not at all my kind of humor – maybe it’s just so subtle that it went right over my head or something.
If I want to laugh out loud, I better go back to P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster books. Now that guy actually knew how to write funny. I’m done with McCall Smith for good – there are just too many better books out there.
I find McCall Smith to be very overrated, but the audio versions of the von Igelfelt trilogy (this being the worst and final of the three novella series) are fabulous. It’s one of those strange instances when the audio actor brought so much to the audio book that the author’s original work isn’t just improved, but eclipsed.
Hm, so maybe I do have to get my hands on those audio versions one of these days… Though it’s not really a surprise to me that Hugh Laurie’s narration should make an event out of a mediocre book, I am still a bit reluctant to wade through this boring story again (not to speak of the sequels, which I presume are equally awful).
Ah well, luckily right now I don’t have the money to buy the audio books anyway, but I’ll keep that it mind.