The Forever Girl

The Forever Girl is the third stand-alone adult novel by Scottish author, Alexander McCall Smith. New Yorker Amanda meets Scots accountant, David, they fall in love and marry. David’s work takes them to Grand Cayman, where they live among other ex-pats, Caribbean islanders and native Caymanians. They have two children: Sally, who renames herself Clover at four years of age, and Billy. Australian Alice and English doctor George live nearby, and their son, James goes to school with Clover at Cayman Prep. Clover and James are firm friends from day one, but as they grow up and Clover finds herself falling in love with James, Amanda realises the reverse is happening between her and David, and she is attracted to James’s father George. As events in their lives (parental separation, boarding school, University) see them drift apart, Clover is unable to dismiss her feelings for James, yet lacks the courage to speak of them because she knows he does not share them. As McCall Smith takes the reader from Cayman to Edinburgh to Melbourne and finally to Singapore through several decades of Amanda and Clover’s lives, he touches on many themes additional themes besides the main one of unrequited love: the concept of one true love; falling out of love; asking others to be a party to deceit; self-control vs repression; jealousy; obsession and irrational behaviour; private passions; platonic friendships; and guilt about inequality. As always, McCall Smith fills his novel with gentle philosophy as he tells his tale at a (perhaps too) sedate pace. McCall Smith has a well-honed expertise with the female protagonist, uncannily able to express what women think and feel. On God, Clover tells Ted “If it were a woman, she wouldn’t make things so hard for women”. He also gives them plenty of words of wisdom: on love, Amanda tells Clover “It’s the one thing, though – the one thing – that you just can’t be rational about. And I think that’s because love is fundamentally irrational – so how can you be rational about something that doesn’t make sense?” and about communication “We imagine that people know what we’re thinking, and they don’t. We misunderstand one another” Clover is a slightly frustrating heroine: she is given so much good advice that she ignores to her peril, yet the reader will not begrudge her the (fairly predictable) happy ending. Classic McCall Smith.