The Perfect Passion Company, by Alexander McCall Smith

 

A matchmaking agency presents a moral quandary for its new owner 

Thirty-year-old Katie has been offered The Perfect Passion Company, an old school introductions business. Her cousin Ness, who started the business and grew it into a respectable concern, has decided to take a gap year in Canada. She may return, she may not. With some trepidation, Katie takes on the business and its bulging files of lonely hearts. 

The matchmaking agency’s next door office on Little Mouse Street is occupied by a man four years Katie’s junior, William Kidd. Before leaving for Canada, Ness introduces William to Katie. It will be helpful, she decides, if the two get to know each other as Katie learns the ropes. William, it turns out, is the perfect gentleman - handsome, intelligent and courteous. There are no drawbacks, although he runs a curious business as a designer of woolen jumpers. He knits the designs up himself, which does lead to some assumptions about his sexuality, but the reader is assured that such reductive masculine stereotypes need not apply here. In fact, William has a fiance, Alice, back in his home city of Melbourne, Australia.

As Katie works through her first few matchmaking cases, William helps out in an advisory role, and the two strike up quite a friendship. Alice, the fiance back in Melbourne, often looms ominously in the background as Katie and William become closer. Is William and Alice’s  relationship really on firm ground, or are there cracks starting to show?  As Katie feels herself falling in love with William, she must do her best to keep her emotions in check.

The Perfect Passion Company started out as two e-book novellas, and now finds itself expanded into a four hundred page novel. All of the usual themes of Alexander McCall Smith’s fiction are present: sticky emotional entanglements, moral dilemmas, questions of how to live ethically. There is a good deal of stoicism in the pages of McCall Smith’s novels. Characters often must practice self-restraint and make decisions that prioritise the welfare of others. When Katie realises that her feelings for William could not only endanger herself, but cause cascading grief and heartbreak, she displays admirable self-control. Reading Alexander McCall Smith’s fiction, it’s always easy to empathise with his characters, to walk in their shoes and wonder, “What would I do?” 

In the end, all moral quandaries are resolved, and the good are rewarded for their exemplary behaviour and steadfastness. The not-so-good, if not punished, are certainly found out. The Perfect Passion Club is an entirely satisfying fiction about real lives and real world problems, with a cast of likable characters muddling through life as best they can.

The Perfect Passion Company, by Alexander McCall Smith. Published by Polygon. $39.99

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