Precious Ramotswe’s Vision of Goodness

Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier—perhaps only—lady private detective, deals on a weekly basis with human selfishness and malfeasance. She deals with it on a weekly basis because her detective business is not very busy; many days are filled with tea drinking, paper shuffling, dress shopping and doughnut eating rather than investigating the relative scarcity of crimes. But Precious knows about the dark recesses of human nature; she has clear eyes for our murky motivations and harmful behaviour. In this she is joined by a huge throng of characters from modern fiction. What differentiates Precious Ramotswe from so many other characters is not her clear vision but her broad vision: she can identify not only what people do wrong but, more importantly for a sane life, she can also identify what people do right. This is a rare wisdom in contemporary literature, and it’s a refreshing quality of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels.

Like many of the morbidities that afflict Western culture—determinism, materialism, nihilism—the perspicacious vision of human dysfunction and evil but myopia to the many forms of goodness has its antecedents in the late nineteenth century. It issues from a section of society that is certain about what is bad but agnostic about what is good. G.K. Chesterton cited Henrik Ibsen as an early example of this tendency in art to a skewed and negative vision:

Now, it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century … The thing that is resented, and, as I think, rightly resented in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical, is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it goes almost blind with doubt.

Precious Ramotswe is not in any doubt about goodness. She knows that goodness inheres in most aspects of life, many of them humble; but she can see this because she herself is humble. She delights in a relaxing cup of redbush tea at home while watching the sun set in brilliant colours behind her beloved acacia trees. This is a small satisfaction, perhaps, but such moments are common in the novels and together they reinforce a sense of prevalent goodness and readily achieved gladness. McCall Smith says that recording the small habits and modest ways in which people enrich their lives and spend their time is one of the key roles of fiction. In his introduction to the recent re-issue of Barbara Pym’s 1952 novel Excellent Women, McCall Smith says, “one of the great and proper concerns of literature is that motley cluster of small concerns that makes up our day-to-day lives”.

The small acts of goodness that make up our day-to-day lives are among the hardest things for a novelist to make dramatic. It’s a reflection of McCall Smith’s all-round skills as an author that he is able to include many of these small, delight-filled moments and not have them seem sentimental or dull. It takes skill to make goodness interesting and dramatic because goodness is common whereas traumatic disaster and outright wickedness are relatively rare in life. It isn’t a novelist’s hardest task to make murder and argument, flames, flood and warfare dramatic because they are not the norm for most people most of the time; they are the exceptional things that punctuate the long run of ordinary good things. A world in which pain and contention were the unrelenting daily experience of the majority would be an intolerable world. If this truly was humanity’s common lot, then every family that survived a picnic would be newsworthy; any farmer who harvested any crop would be a sensation; a six-pack of beer that was enjoyed in peace between friends would be celebrated with a public holiday, assuming there was any stable government to proclaim the holiday to the tormented remnants of the ravaged population. In this matter at least, the writers who seek to be strictly realistic by developing their eye for the difficult and unpleasant things in life are often woefully unrealistic at the most basic level; their world, as opposed to the real world, is one of near-unrelenting negativity: they closed one eye, squinted through the other, saw all He had made and, behold, it was mostly blurry and bad.

Precious Ramotswe sees that life is mostly good, and she is thankful. She perceives that life is a gift which people may use or abuse; they have a choice and she chooses to receive the gift with gratitude and make the most of it. Some people choose to abuse their life and the life of others. In Blue Shoes and Happiness, Mma Ramotswe remembers that it was her feckless first husband, Note Mokoti, who opened her eyes to the hard-heartedness of the self-centred:

The discovery can be a painful one, as it was for her, but it is one that has to be made. Of course it did not mean that one had to retreat into cynicism; of course it did not mean that. Mma Ramotswe had learned to be realistic about people, but this did not mean that one could not see some good in most people, however much it might be obscured by the bad. If one persisted, if one gave people a chance to show their better nature, and—this was important—if one was prepared to forgive, then people could show a remarkable ability to change their ways. Except for Note Mokoti, of course.

It would not surprise Mma Ramotswe, therefore, that deep honesty, sincerity and a profound sense of justice, for example, could be found at an impropitious time in an unlikely candidate: in the heart of the thief crucified with Jesus. Her faith, realistic because nuanced, in the fundamental goodness of life—including the freedom of people to respond in goodness to goodness in the form of love, care, forgiveness and gentle correction—is based on a quiet but firm faith in the goodness of creation. Again, Chesterton highlights this primary goodness:

But I do affirm, with the full weight of sincerity, that trees and flowers are good at the beginning, whatever happens to them at the end; that human lives were good at the beginning, whatever happens to them at the end. The ordinary modern progressive position is that this is a bad universe, but it will certainly get better. I say it is certainly a good universe, even if it gets worse. I say that these trees and flowers, stars and sexes, are primarily, not merely ultimately, good. In the Beginning the power beyond words created heaven and earth. In the beginning He looked upon them and saw that they were good.

Mma Ramotswe’s faith in goodness is in part a result of her revered father’s teaching; part results from her training at Sunday school; and part is simply connatural and instinctive. In The Double Comfort Safari Club, Mma Ramotswe remembers what her late father taught her. He emphasised that having the right approach to life was a crucial gift. He told her:

Do not complain about your life. Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself. Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding you have managed to find yourself.

Mma Ramotswe embraced her father’s instruction. She was also instructed in goodness at Sunday school; there she embraced most but not all of the Sunday school’s teaching:

Precious Ramotswe had learned about good and evil at Sunday school. The cousin had taken her there when she was six, and she had gone there every Sunday without fail until she was eleven. That was enough time for her to learn all about right and wrong, although she had been puzzled—and remained so—when it came to certain other aspects of religion. She could not believe that the Lord had walked on water—you just couldn’t do that—nor had she believed the story about the feeding of the five thousand, which was equally impossible … But right and wrong—that was another matter, and she had experienced no difficulty in understanding that it was wrong to lie, to steal, and kill other people.

The ethical and metaphysical teaching at Sunday school seemed to have confirmed in Precious Ramotswe a faith in goodness that was connatural and instinctive. It is not a faith that has been worked out logically from first to last. Apologetics, for example, would seem perhaps both unnecessary and contrived to her; in the novels, pushy religious people are portrayed as sincere but painful. She goes to church, but not from a fierce devotion. Her faith is quiet, personal and perhaps at one with that pre-logical faith that Jacques Maritain in Approaches to God says is humanity’s intuitive response to the wonder of being in the face of the possibility of non-being:

In this primordial vitality, the movement of the human reason in its approach to God is a natural reasoning, that is intuitive-like or irresistibly maintained in, and vitalized by, the intellectual flash of the intuition of existence … It involves a reasoning, but a reasoning after the fashion of an intuitive grasp, bathed in the primordial intuition of existence. Let us say that this natural knowledge is a kind of innocent knowledge, a knowledge free from all dialectic. Such a knowledge is rich in certitude, a certitude that is indeed compelling, although it exists in an imperfect logical state. [Maritain’s italics]

Mma Ramotswe’s faith is a subterranean stream that she draws from to find strength and wisdom. It inspires gratitude. She is often thankful for potential harms and evils that are disarmed by the practice of patience, prudence, forbearance or honesty. Even a large cobra that makes its way into the mechanic’s office that is Mma Ramotswe’s centre of operations is quickly caught and released with no harm to the snake or the staff; gentleness, care, and respect for another creature’s being, even a threatening cobra’s being, define Mma Ramotswe’s distinctive approach to any problem.

At the conclusion of The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café, Mma Ramotswe and her kind, beloved husband Mr J.L.B. Matekoni walk in their garden in the evening:

They left the veranda. The light was fading quickly now, but there was enough to see the things they wanted to see—the progress of the next crop of beans, the state of the Namaqualand daisies that Mma Ramotswe had recently planted along the side of the house, the new shrubs put in by the mopipi tree.

There was also enough light, Mma Ramotswe reflected, to see that the world was not always a place of pain and loss, but a place where our simple human affairs—those matters that for all their pettiness still sometimes confounded us—were not insoluble, and were not without the possibility of resolution.

Of course, it is not the role of fiction to maintain the fiction that all is good in the world. Half a century before Alexander McCall Smith started to write The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Flannery O’Connor felt under pressure—from family and ignorant church people—to populate her fiction with characters that were wholesome, good and upright. She rejected this pressure for two reasons: first, her peculiar talent led her to create grotesque characters; and second, a society that has lost a sense of what was normal for humanity had to be shaken to see that what it thought were normal figures were in fact grotesque.

O’Connor could see what was truly grotesque because she had a clear vision for what was normal, a vision that was informed by her Christian doctrine of man. And it is this sense of what was normal that O’Connor felt was lacking in society and in the nihilistic literature she saw around her.

O’Connor wrote about grotesque characters because she understood the intended norms for humanity; her secular peers wrote about grotesque characters because they didn’t know about these norms or had rejected them. As a consequence, serious modern fiction has tended, often but not always, to become a sort of inadequate circus whose main attraction is a sideshow of maladjusted and malignant freaks, with little thought given to parading the vigour of the strong man, the grace and mutual trust of acrobats, the bravery and skill of the lion tamer, or the inventive hilarity and teamwork of clowns.

Such a tendency, and such an odd negative sideshow, continues in the arts today. But there are many exceptions and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is an obvious one.