The Perfect Passion Company: matches and despatches, as they say

The Perfect Passion Company is about the serious business of trying to hitch people up with potential life mates. It’ll set book club voices aflame.

The Perfect Passion Company is about the serious business of trying to hitch people up with potential life mates. Picture: istock

There’s something just a bit extraordinary about Alexander McCall Smith. This Scottish professor of law is a popular writer, a trashmeister if you want to be hierarchical about genres (and we do, don’t we) and yet he has a refined warmth that is not separate from the urbanity of his prose and the quiet irony of his wit. He finds the bizarrely charming in that aspect of the everyday that we take so much for granted.

The Perfect Passion Company by Alexander McCall Smith

Ever since The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency he has sold millions of books and you can wonder how an endeavour so overtly mousy – to use one of his words – can cast such a spell and catch us in such a web of enchantment. It’s partly that the language is so precise while the world of references is effortless and adept.

The last example is The Perfect Passion Company. It is a book about a dating agency and the first striking thing about it is the distance it has from the sex apps which the kids distract and confound themselves with – Hinge and Tinder and Grindr and what you will.

No, The Perfect Passion Company is about the serious business of trying to hitch people up with potential life mates and it derives from the belief – not the faith so much as the hope – that the ideal mate (or at any rate, the good enough mate) exists for everyone.

An older Scottish woman has been running the show but gives it away to take a holiday in rural Ontario where she becomes friends with a couple of pretty hopeless middle-aged men. Back in Edinburgh a woman of thirty-ish has taken over the show, and is doing her utmost to bring people to her paying clients. She got jack of her own previous partner when she realised that he didn’t believe in society – in the sense of health services and libraries and all.

The novel evolves as a kind of multiple detective story, a contemporary Canterbury Tales towards whatever shrine of mundanity crops up. There’s a Robbie Burns night – misplaced on the calendar for the benefit of tourists – and this comes not only with the brandishing of the haggis held high but with beautiful apt quotation of Burns, on love.

McCall Smith casts a spell as he ruminates. There is the constant hum of human possibility and conjunction. And central to the yes–no–maybe world of matchmaking where everything is possible and nothing is certain, there’s a young Australian who becomes the heroine’s great friend. He makes her coffee every morning and he leans against things as he ponders the world they share. He’s from Melbourne and he’s at some distance from the Aussie archetype because his obsession in life is knitting jumpers which he does with extraordinary skill. He is a quiet young man, full of sensitivity and intelligence but he also comes with a background that includes a fiancee who is studying medicine in Melbourne. The portrait of this boy is done with a luminous credibility. He is an absolutely believable figure in this novel. We believe this young guy as he leans and opines and remembers. We believe him when he talks about some schooldays brute of a bully and we believe him when he says he wept for the bully. And his multi-shaded knit jumpers – earth colours, brown and its correlations for his great confidante – are as real in their evocation as the works of art.

Much of McCall Smith’s writing has a natural grace, and also a kind of upper level soap. It is hard to resist, though why is a mystery. We wonder (and at times fail to wonder) who is being set up by whom. Did the holiday-maker in the Canadian wilds enjoying the sense of infinite space and cold have her own glimmer of what might be possible for her successor?

You read The Perfect Passion Company wondering what women’s magazine of a fantasy world you have stumbled into but then realise that the joke is on you and so is the sexism. This is a book that toys with the conundrum of what we make of the love we try to nourish and of the loyalties we stumble towards as best we can, dumbfounded and at times bewildered. The aspects of popular writing McCall Smith summons up have their own magic and his treatment has its own mastery.

It’s an incidental charm that he likes Australians and knows how we speak. He talks about “dobbing.” It’s not hard to imagine The Perfect Passion Company setting different voices aflame in the book clubs. It is literate, worldly and full of simplicities it scrutinises with a detail and a delectation that amazes the soul.

Peter Craven is a culture critic