La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith

La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith

The setting is England just before and during WW2, and then skips ahead to the Cuban Crisis. This book was lent to me by a friend with whom I had been in a TMI course in which we had been discussing the Cuba Crisis. It is unlike the other McCall Smith books I have read, although the love that the writer shows for English countryside reminds me of the love that Mme Ramotswe has for Botswana. People who love England will love this book.

It is beautifully written, with much attention to setting, both place and time. The behaviour of the characters is appropriate for the time. It is a thought-provoking little book, and a pleasure to read.

The protagonist, Lavender, or 'La,' does not have an easy life, but takes happiness where she can find it. In many ways she does not live up to early expectations. She belongs to that age of women who were accepted into universities, where they tended to study liberal arts and find upon graduation that they had to find their own niches, and there were not many of them. La does well in music and English lit at Cambridge but lets herself fall into an unhappy marriage and then is left a widow before the war. She is well provided for by her in-laws, and carries on with her life, doing whatever turns up, and as time goes on, she realizes that she has never reached out and accomplished very much.

But she did do one thing, and that, in the end, seems to have been enough. She organized an orchestra as a morale booster during the war, and held a peace concert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Just as the concert was underway, Krushchev made his announcement that he would withdraw the missiles.

Everyone in her circle felt that her life was associated with music and peace, and that is what she was loved and respected for. But apart from the orchestra, her life seemed empty.

There is a love story that runs through the plot. During the war, she meets a Polish airman, and a love affair could have developed, but curiously, she reported him as a possible German spy.

In another incident, some money was reported missig by a farmer for whom she worked, and she reported her suspicions of the culprit to the policeman. She turned out to be quite wrong in both cases. So there is a strange sub-plot about informing on people on the basis of suspicion and conjecture before sufficient evidence is obtained. This may be the effect of wartime thinking, although no mention is made of the secrecy warnings that were common then.

She paid for this busybodyness because Feliks, the Pole, who was quite innocent, was taken away for interrogation and naturally felt resentment. However, he turns up for the Cuban concert, and events take a happier turn.

So the strength of the novel is that it is well-written, a pleasure to read, and thought-provoking. It considers an ordinary person and her contribution to her own small world and concludes that if everyone made just her own little contribution to what she believed in, then that is sufficient reason to rejoice. But she is a woman with faults. There is this nasty lack of trust and compulsion to report on others, and there is a failure to reach out and make her life into something. But when she finally becomes proactive and organizes the second concert, her life takes a turn, and she does find happiness.

McCall Smith is a professor of medical law at the Univ. of Edinburgh and serves on many national and international bioethics boards. He has written many books in many series: First Ladies' Detective Agency, Isabel Dalhousie Series, Portuguese Irregular Verbs and 44 Scotland Street Series. La's Orchestra is not in a series.
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