Double Comfort Safari Club

 Alexander McCall Smith’s The Double Comfort Safari Club, published in 2010, is not, in any conventional sense, a detective novel. Its mysteries, though they provide the narrative scaffolding, are almost incidental to the larger enterprise. What McCall Smith offers instead is something gentler and, in its own understated fashion, more ambitious: a meditation on kindness, human frailty, jealousy, generosity and the perpetual difficulty of living alongside other human beings. The real intrigue lies not so much in discovering who did what, but in observing how Precious Ramotswe responds to the moral ambiguities of life — and, more particularly, in understanding her conviction that people ought to treat one another with compassion.

Set principally in Gaborone, Botswana, with a substantial portion of the narrative unfolding amid the extraordinary beauty of the Okavango Delta, the novel returns us to the wonderfully humane universe of Mma Ramotswe, her formidable assistant Grace Makutsi, J.L.B. Matekoni and their familiar constellation of friends, clients and acquaintances. The change of setting is particularly welcome. The Delta transports Precious and Grace beyond the reassuring familiarity of their customary surroundings and into a landscape of waterways, grasslands and wildlife, where nature itself seems to acquire a quiet narrative presence.

The central case begins with an almost whimsical request. An American woman who had once visited Botswana on safari has died leaving a sum of money to a safari guide who had shown her an exceptional act of kindness. The difficulty is that she cannot remember his name, nor can she identify with any certainty the safari camp at which their paths had crossed. Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi consequently travel northwards into the Okavango Delta in search of this elusive beneficiary.

The premise might easily have been developed into an elaborate detective adventure, replete with clues, pursuit and dramatic revelations. McCall Smith, however, has little interest in such conventional machinery. The investigation becomes instead an occasion to examine memory, character, generosity and those mysterious, often imperceptible ways in which one human being can alter the life of another. In his hands, the detective story becomes almost a pretext for a more contemplative inquiry into human nature.

Precious Ramotswe remains one of contemporary fiction’s most endearing protagonists precisely because she is so resolutely unheroic in the conventional sense. She possesses neither extraordinary deductive powers nor the forensic sophistication of the modern fictional detective. There are no laboratories, ingenious algorithms or feats of intellectual pyrotechnics to assist her. Her instruments are far more modest — and perhaps, McCall Smith suggests, considerably more useful: patience, observation, experience, empathy and common sense.

Her great insight is that human beings are seldom wholly virtuous or wholly wicked. They are creatures of contradiction, capable in one moment of foolishness, jealousy, selfishness or cruelty and, in another, of remorse, generosity and genuine transformation. Consequently, Mma Ramotswe’s investigations possess an unmistakably moral dimension. She does not merely ask, What happened? She is invariably drawn towards the more searching questions: Why did it happen? What prompted this person to behave as they did? Can the damage be repaired? And, above all, is punishment necessarily the most constructive response?

Her philosophy may strike a modern reader as almost disarmingly old-fashioned. She believes that kindness matters; that people should, whenever possible, be accorded the benefit of the doubt; and that patience can accomplish what anger so frequently destroys. Yet McCall Smith never permits these principles to harden into moral sermonising. They emerge organically from conversations, observations and the seemingly trivial incidents of everyday existence.

If Precious embodies patience, equilibrium and moral perspective, Grace Makutsi represents a rather more turbulent and complicated sensibility. Intelligent, ambitious, proud and occasionally prickly, Grace has travelled a considerable distance since the beginning of the series. Yet beneath her confidence remains an insecurity that becomes particularly pronounced whenever circumstances elude her control.

In this novel, her fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, suffers a grave accident and loses a leg below the knee. Matters are compounded when Phuti’s formidable aunt assumes responsibility for his care and, in effect, excludes Grace from his life. The episode allows McCall Smith to revisit one of his recurrent concerns: the corrosive consequences of possessiveness.

The aunt’s conduct is comic on the surface, but beneath the humour lies a more serious moral question. At what point does love cease to be care and become control? When does concern for another person’s welfare become a pretext for dominating their existence? Grace, understandably, does not respond with Precious’s characteristic serenity. She is angry, suspicious and exasperated. The contrast between the two women is consequently one of the novel’s most engaging elements.

Precious approaches Grace’s predicament with the wider perspective that experience has given her. Grace feels it; Precious attempts to understand it. Their relationship is therefore considerably richer than that of employer and employee. They function almost as complementary moral voices. Grace asks, quite reasonably, why she should tolerate unreasonable behaviour; Precious counters with the more disquieting question of whether answering unreasonable behaviour with anger will actually make anything better.

The novel contains several subsidiary cases, including matters of marital suspicion and possible infidelity. One couple approaches Precious because one partner suspects the other of having an affair; another client seeks assistance after being manipulated within a relationship and losing his home. Once again, McCall Smith is less interested in the mechanics of detection than in the emotional consequences of suspicion.

This is quintessentially McCall Smith. He understands that suspicion, once unleashed, can itself become destructive. An innocent person may suffer because another has merely imagined them guilty; equally, an apparently innocent explanation may conceal a more complicated reality. Precious therefore proceeds with characteristic caution. Her objective is not simply to validate the fears of her clients but to arrive at the truth without inflicting unnecessary collateral damage upon already fragile lives.

The safari section is perhaps the novel’s greatest atmospheric pleasure. McCall Smith employs the Okavango not merely as an exotic backdrop but as a setting through which Precious reconnects with the elemental beauty of Botswana. The Delta emerges as a world of waterways, grasslands and wildlife, possessed of extraordinary tranquillity yet never entirely divorced from danger. Crocodiles, hippopotamuses and competing safari interests remind us that beneath the serenity of the landscape there remains an untamed and unpredictable world.

There is particular pleasure in seeing Precious outside Gaborone. She is a woman profoundly attached to Botswana, and her affection for the country constitutes one of the emotional foundations of the series. McCall Smith’s descriptions of the landscape are beautiful precisely because they are restrained. He does not turn Africa into a theatrical spectacle designed merely to dazzle the reader. Nature becomes instead part of the novel’s moral atmosphere.

The languid movement of water, the patience of animals and the immense spaciousness of the Delta seem to mirror Precious’s own philosophy. Life, the novel suggests, cannot always be compelled into obedience; sometimes wisdom consists in learning how to move around obstacles rather than attempting to demolish them. The river consequently becomes an almost subliminal metaphor for the novel itself — and for Precious’s approach to the difficulties of human existence.

The curious title refers to the safari establishment at the heart of the story, but it also captures something of the novel’s larger sensibility. There is, indeed, something deliberately comforting about McCall Smith’s Botswana: a world populated by people who drink tea, converse at length, worry about one another, make mistakes and, having made them, attempt to put things right.

This is not escapism in any simplistic sense. McCall Smith does not pretend that life is innocent of suffering. His characters encounter accidents, betrayal, loneliness, disappointment, financial anxiety and the wounds inflicted by relationships. Yet he proposes that ordinary human kindness can itself constitute a form of resistance to the harshness of existence. That deceptively simple proposition explains much of the enduring appeal of the series.

One of the book’s most attractive qualities is McCall Smith’s evident affection for what might broadly be described as traditional Botswana values: courtesy, community, respect for elders, hospitality, restraint and a reluctance to rush towards judgement. Precious repeatedly finds herself measuring these virtues against the more aggressive imperatives of modern life — self-interest, materialism, vanity and the desire to control others.

Yet the novel is not merely nostalgic. Botswana is changing, and McCall Smith is sufficiently perceptive to acknowledge that transformation. Modern aspirations, new wealth and altered social expectations increasingly coexist with older traditions. The friction between these competing worlds gives the book much of its quiet intellectual substance.

The humour, too, is characteristically gentle rather than uproarious. It springs principally from personality: Grace’s impatience, Precious’s serene observations, J.L.B. Matekoni’s modesty and the eccentricities of the people who wander into the detective agency generate a succession of small comic pleasures. McCall Smith possesses a particularly acute eye for the discrepancy between what people imagine they are doing and what they are, in fact, doing.

There is also an understated wit in Precious’s observations on men and women, marriage, money, consultants and the perennial absurdities of human behaviour. The comedy never descends into cruelty because it is rooted in affection rather than ridicule. His prose is simple, leisurely and conversational, sometimes almost deceptively so. There are no conspicuous stylistic fireworks. Yet beneath that apparent simplicity lies a considerable understanding of human psychology.

Perhaps McCall Smith’s greatest accomplishment is his ability to smuggle philosophical reflection into what appears to be ordinary conversation. A discussion about marriage becomes an inquiry into trust; a conversation about money becomes an examination of greed; a petty disagreement suddenly reveals the deeper anatomy of pride. This is why his books are best read slowly. They are not novels to be devoured merely to discover what happens next. They invite the reader to pause, reflect and linger over the accumulated wisdom of seemingly inconsequential encounters.

The Double Comfort Safari Club is, ultimately, a warm, humane and quietly philosophical novel. Its greatest pleasure lies in returning to the world of Precious Ramotswe — a world in which wisdom is valued above cleverness, kindness possesses greater potency than aggression, and patience is often a more effective instrument than confrontation. The Okavango setting lends the narrative beauty and freshness, while Grace Makutsi’s emotional predicament provides its most compelling continuing storyline.

More importantly, the novel reaffirms the central philosophy that has sustained the series from the beginning: human beings are complicated, frequently foolish and occasionally disappointing, but they remain worthy of understanding; life can be difficult and sometimes cruel, but its harshness can be mitigated by the manner in which we treat one another.

In an age increasingly enamoured of frenetic plots, moral certainties and cynical protagonists, there is something almost quietly radical about a novel that insists upon the enduring value of decency. McCall Smith does not shout this conviction from the rooftops. He offers it instead, with a cup of tea, a patient conversation and a knowing smile — and perhaps that is precisely why it is so persuasive.