The Inquisition (oops, congregation for the doctrine of the faith) may be soon knocking at the door. Reading Alexander McCall Smith’s wonderful The Girl Who Married a Lion has provoked heretical thoughts in this reviewer’s head. For, while Pope Benedict and his political cohorts argue for the exclusive inclusion of Judeo-Christian roots into the pre-amble of the European Constitution, I’m left wondering (partly thanks to McCall Smith’s collection of folk tales) whether they had childhoods at all? Is it possible to picture a European culture without the contribution of Aesop and his morality tales?

Indeed, long before we teach our children the abstract notions of original sin and the redemptive power of crucifixion, we have, in Europe as elsewhere, for centuries taught our moral codes through collections like those of the Greek fabulist.

McCall Smith, the author of the best-selling #1 Ladies Detective Agency series, writes in his introduction : “Folk tales throughout the world have a striking number of common features, and many familiar themes crop up in folk traditions that are culturally very different. In a sense, then, these tales are part of a universal language which can speak to people across human frontiers, just as music does.”

One of the beauties of this collection is that it seems both strange and famliar. The interaction between humans and animals is strange and magical (for example in the tale of the girl who married a lion), when taken in contrast with Aesop, but less so when we think of Greek mythology. The cast of characters may be necessarily different, with lions receiving their proverbial share of roles, but there are also othere more famiiar to European audiences like the hare. The outcomes are also unexpected, suggesting that wisdom and morality depend as much upon environment and necessity, as some divinely ordained package.

A case in point. In the story Pumpkin, a widow and her five sons have a field that grows abundant quantities of pumpkins, so while they have certain misfortunes at least they can rely on these fields for sustenance. When they find there fields continuously destroyed by hungry elephants, they hatch a plan. The youngest of the boys is fitted into a pumpkin, which, needless to say, the head elephant with all the greed he can muster eats. So, here we have a motif that is not a hundred miles away from the Trojan horse, or the biblical story of Jonah. The child, in the belly of the elephant, searches and locates the heart and deals a death blow. A story that has different characters, but a certain familiarity. The final lines of the story though pack the punch: “The following night, many people came to see that family to help them eath the elephant meat. They ate many pumpkins too.” There’s a moral there, but it’s one you have to think about – as with nearly all of these lean, muscular stories.

One could spend time worry about the ethics of it all, reading a book of African folk tales recounted by a Zimbabwean born white, writing in Edinburgh. It would be churlish though – like all those politically correct bores who castigated the TV series Friends because it didn’t have different ethnic groups in it. The truth is that this is a beautiful collection of strange and enchanting stories, and McCall’s enthusiasm in telling them shines through. They are, for the main part, from two countries, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Two countries that McCall Smith has more than a passing attachment, having grown up in one, and taught for several years in the other. They were collected by McCall Smith, with the aid of an interpreter. How much his skill as an author has played its part, for this ignorant western white boy it’s impossible to tell, not knowing any of the originals. In truth, I couldn’t care less. The stories, as McCall Smith emphasises, are the important things, and they shine brilliantly.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and so, while you may have unwittingly forsaken Aesop’s fables as you’ve aged, The Girl who Married a Lion gives you a wonderful opportunity to re-discover this common human art form that tells us so many different things about ourselves and our societies.