FICTION
The Perfect Passion Company
Alexander McCall Smith
Polygon, $39.99
Alexander McCall Smith’s latest book, a stand-alone called The Perfect Passion Company, was first published in instalments as three separate stories but featured an overarching narrative, rather like connective tissue, about the adventurous middle-aged Ness, her younger cousin Katie, and the too-good-to-be-true William, a handsome young Australian man who knits for a living.
Ness has made her way through three husbands by her early 40s, having gone through two divorces before being widowed by a kilt-related parachuting accident. She runs a dating agency, or, as she prefers to call it, an introduction bureau. But after 10 years of this, she hands the running of the agency, along with her Edinburgh flat, over to Katie and heads across the Atlantic for a “grown-up gap year” in the wilds of Canada, where she soon finds herself fending off two suitors of her own.
Katie finds out the hard way that some people seem simply unmatchable, but with William’s help, she manages three successful pairings, plus what looks like an incidental fourth. But the tale of Katie and William themselves is another budding romance, developing through their thoughtful conversations as they explore the personalities and desires of the bureau’s clients.
In telling these tales of successful and unsuccessful matchmaking, McCall Smith explores the things that we want from partners and from love and romance, as distinct from the things that we think we want. Some of the clients have simple requirements regarding height or age. Some want their dinners cooked for them. Others want someone who can tolerate their tendency to hyperventilate, or their obsession with classic cars.
McCall Smith’s lastest novel explores the things that we want from partners and from love and romance.
What emerges through these stories is a pattern whereby successful matches happen when people fit neatly around each other’s needs and qualities, rather than the usual shopping-list approach that reduces other human beings to commodities and makes for so many online disasters, or the sadly misguided conviction that your ideal partner would be someone just like you.
The successfully coupled-up in these stories are those who discover the pleasures of reciprocity and the balance of giving and receiving.
The best example of this is the successful match of pretty, vivacious Jenny, who never stops talking, with homely, gentle Peter, who has mastered the art of discreetly adjusting the volume on his hearing aids. But as a general philosophy of matchmaking, this dovetail approach is hinted at in the opening pages, where Katie is telling a friend how Ness’s narcissistic second husband ran off with a photographer: “Oh well. These things happen. As long as they found what they wanted. Narcissists like photographers.” “Yes. And photographers like narcissists. It worked for everybody, I think.”