Pleasant surprises

Very few people imagine their own future accurately. And then they're often pleasantly surprised.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse

A good novel, like a good life, is one that offers pleasant surprises, and Alexander McCall Smith's 2017 stand-alone novel The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse certainly does this. His first surprise is that Peter Woodhouse turns out to be neither a pilot nor even a man but a dog.

The story covers nearly 40 years and several countries, beginning in England during World War II. Val Eliot joins the Women's Land Army, meaning that she takes work on a farm while most of the young men are fighting the war. She proves a good worker for Archie, an elderly farmer. She soon falls in love with Mike, an American pilot stationed nearby.

As for Peter Woodhouse, he belongs to a nearby farmer who mistreats his animals. Val's simple-minded cousin Willy works for this farmer and steals the dog after a beating, taking him to Archie's farm. So the other farmer won't find him, Peter Woodhouse is passed on to Mike at the base. Mike begins taking the dog on his reconnaissance flights over Germany, the reason for "the Good Pilot" part of the title. When Mike is shot down over the Netherlands, Peter Woodhouse goes down too.

By then the war is nearly over, and Ubi, a German soldier who never liked fighting anyway, finds the pilot and the dog but protects them both, leading to a postwar friendship.

The plot moves quickly, with numerous sudden turns along the way, not all pleasant ones. Yet with the possible exception of surviving the plane crash without benefit of parachutes, they seem realistic ones. And as with Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, readers never know what they are going to get. It proves a pleasure finding out.