Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith.✔✔✔

McCall Smith is a real favorite of mine. I love the No. 1 Detective Agency novels, and the "portuguese series" novels were so funny - The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, etc. This one begins a new series, and is set in London in an apartment building named Corduroy Mansions. The story revolves around some interesting characters who either live in the building or have some connection to people who do reside there. There's William, a wine merchant in his fifties whose son, Eddie, aged 24, is proving to be a bit of a nuisance in the apartment and William is trying to find an appropriate way to get him to leave. His solution is the rent - yes, rent- a dog, because Eddie hates dogs. This one's name is Freddie de la Hay, and he was a former luggage sniffer at Heathrow.

There are the four girls who room together - Caroline, who is doing a Masters' degree in Art History, Jennie, who works for Oedipus Snark, A MP, Dee, who works in a Vitamin store and wants to do a colonic irrigation on one of her (male) co-workers, plus Jo, whom we haven't yet met. Oedipus Snark is also a character in this novel, as is his erstwhile girlfriend, Barbara Ragg, plus Bertea Snark, his mother, who is writing a biography of her son, and Terrence Moongrove, my favorite character and Oedpius' uncle. Terrence is a kind of left-over flower child who is completely and utterly inept at just about everything he does, especially when it comes to cars.

Here's a couple of quotes I loved. The first illustrates how the author satirizes modern social and business values:

This is William, the wine merchant speaking about his job: " A semi-promise was where the client said that he would take something and the merchant said that he would set it aside, both knowing that neither meant it."

And the second concerns dogs - Freddie de la Hay is very central to this novel, but I feel this is so true.:

"Not much happens to dogs; they lead their lives around our feet, in the interstices of more complex doings, from which perspective they look up at the busier human world, eager to participate,eager to understand, but for ever limited by biology and the vagaries of evolution to being small-part players in the drama."

I found this read, as with all of Smith's books, a gentle, humorous, yet enlightening read. He is a keen observer of human nature. Can you imagine an MP named OEDIPUS SNARK?????