Was Isabel, in fact, any more judgmental than most people? The reader spends a great deal of time inside Isabel’s head, as it were.

We spent some time on the subject of judgment and the judging of others. Yet Isabel admits that even thinking about such a thing makes her feel old. Our group more or less agreed with these sentiments. In this way an entire generation had lost a vital piece of the moral jigsaw, and now we saw the results: a society in which nobody would help, nobody would feel for others a society in which aggressive language and insensitivity were the norm. They were the method of transmitting the message of moral consideration. A moral disaster had ensued, because manners were the basic building block of civil society. How utterly shortsighted we had been to listen to those who thought that manners were a bourgeois affectation, an irrelevance, which need no longer be valued. International law, after all, was simply a system of manners writ large. And this worked at every level, from the most minor transaction between two people to dealings between nations.

If each party knew what the other should do, then conflict would be unlikely. They were intended to avoid friction between people, and they did this by regulating the contours of an encounter. They knew how to exchange those courtesies which made life go smoothly, which was what manners were all about. It was so easy dealing with people who were well-mannered…. In this passage, Isabel considers the importance of good manners: Others among us felt that the philosophical questions deeply enriched the novel. She’s pretentious and/or arrogant (two adjectives which I would not myself have thought to apply to her, so I was interested to learn that others found them apt, in the circumstances.)Īnn felt impatient with Isabel’s philosophizing she felt that it got in the way of the plot. (I probably didn’t mind this characteristic because her judgments so often agree with mine.) She keeps “bumping into herself” (love that locution!), trying to use reason to understand and control feelings, an effort that’s pretty much doomed to fail. In my post on The Careful Use of Compliments, I said that I envision Isabel as a model for a dress of the mid-twentieth century. She seems like someone in her sixties, not in her early forties, as she’s purported to be. Septemat 5:13 pm ( Book clubs, Book review, books, Mystery fiction)Īn especially interesting aspect of the recent Usual Suspects discussion of The Sunday Philosophy Club centered on Isabel Dalhousie’s character. The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith: a book discussion

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