Rankin and Rebus

At one point we read nothing but Ian Rankin while we were travelling on the Continent in 2007 and then when we got back to the UK. By the time we left for NZ, in December that year, we’d acquired a bunch of his books and had them sent home. They arrived some months later, by which time we were no longer quite so enthused about the author. We’d probably done our dash for a while as far as the gloomy main character, John Rebus, and his even gloomier Edinburgh, were concerned.
However, in the last few weeks, I’ve gone back to reading Rankin again. The books are as gloomy as ever, the sun seldom shines in Edinburgh and Rebus still smokes and drinks like there’s no tomorrow. But they’re almost un-put-downable.
Part of the reason for the return is that I picked up a collection of Rankin’s short stories at a secondhand bookshop just along from where I work. These proved to be even more bitter and twisted, in some cases, than the Rebus books – although there are some Rebus stories amongst the batch, including one longer one that’s a short version of one of the novels, with some identical scenes and dialogue, but a completely different ending.
And then, as ‘light’ relief from some other stuff I was reading, I got into Strip Jack, one of the ones we’d bought in England (I seem to remember it was one of four we got new at a bargain price in a charity shop in Sheringham).
And today I’ve just finished Knots and Crosses, Rankin’s first foray into the world of Rebus, way back in 1985. It was intended to be a one-off story about Rebus, but obviously the character wasn’t willing to sit back and retire. This story doesn’t quite have the sharpness of Rankin’s later work, and the story is a bit derivative of other authors in the same genre, but Rebus is there in full force all the same. The only thing lacking, perhaps, is the sardonic sense of humour.
Knots and Crosses isn’t one of the ones we bought in England, as it happens. It turned up amongst a bunch of books from the ODT – books that were sent in by their publishers for review, but which were eventually handed out, for one reason or another, as ‘Christmas reading’ for the reviewers. Perhaps the book editor thought that Rankin and Rebus hardly needed a review of a reissue of a book that was nearly a quarter of a century old from a writer who’s work is so popular no review will make the slightest difference to his sales.

The Complaints

I can never make up my mind whether I'm a pessimistic optimist or an optimistic pessimist. Either way the glass is neither half empty or half full, for me. I think I just wonder why someone drank the first half and left the rest?

Remembered on the way home that I hadn't mentioned reading Ian Rankin's latest book, The Complaints. My wife and I became a great fan of Rankin while in England where we read several of the Inspector Rebus novels while travelling around. (I seem to remember we discovered him in Florence - someone left one of the novels in the hotel we stayed in.)

The Complaints doesn't feature Rebus (who may have been 'retired' by Rankin, I think) and the main character doesn't quite have the edge that Rebus possesses, nor the sheer bloody-mindedness that makes the latter so enjoyable, but he's a person in his own right, and he has a side-kick who kept me guessing throughout as to whether he was on the side of the angels or not.

The Complaints are a section of the Scottish police force who investigate other policemen, those who've been suspected of corruption, or bribery, or anything else that's against the law. When the story opens they've just finished a major case, and the main character (whose name escapes me, as does the copy of the book for the moment¹) is settling on his lees until he finds that he might also be in the poo. Typical of a Rankin tale there are complications galore, and you have to keep your wits about you to know why who did what did it when; as well, there are some impoverished relationships, and even the ones that are working seem likely to fall apart if the participants aren't careful.

I don't know that it's my favourite Rankin, but it's certainly a page-turner, and his writing style is, as always, superb.

¹ Just saw that the main character's name is Malcolm Fox, a name that gets played around with quite a bit in the story.

Rankin outranks Tyler

I began reading another Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation.  It's very good, and the opening chapter, told by one of the sisters of the main character, is a prime example of how to write as a character who doesn't know the effect she's having on other people.

However, while I was in the library today, I discovered that there's a new Ian Rankin book out - Saints of the Shadow Bible - in which Rankin not only brings that superb character, John Rebus, back into the force, but stacks him up against Malcolm Fox, the main character in two other recent Rankin titles. (It's very easy to type Ranking instead of Rankin for some reason.)

The book is available on Kindle, of course, so I'm already well into, and poor old Anne will just have to wait now until I've finished it.

Ian Rankin

There was a Starbucks on the corner of Lothian Rd and Bread St.
He’d gone for filter, complaining that he could buy a whole jar for the price of one of the costlier options.
Ian Rankin - The Naming of the Dead - page 121

We’re been devouring Ian Rankin novels since we came to Europe. It just happened that we’d picked one up before we came, and decided to read it while we were away, one after the other, rather than carry too many books. (Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey was the other choice.)
My wife is now on her fifth book in his Inspector Rebus series; I’m waiting for her to finish it (which means I‘ve had nothing to read - in English).
This is what we’ve finished:
Fleshmarket Close - the one we brought with us, and have now left somewhere. The Hanging Garden - we bought secondhand in Florence and then gave to someone in Barcelona. A Question of Blood - picked up in a double edition with The Hanging Garden in Florence.
Dead Souls - bought new at the Barcelona Sants railway station - the only Rankin in the English books on sale.
What’s great about Rankin as a thriller/mystery writer is that he’s literate, and doesn’t write down to his readers. It’s never annoying to read his books because of poor and hackneyed writing. There’s no formula to his books, except perhaps that he always has two investigations going on simultaneously; sometimes they connect, sometimes not, and in one or two of the books there have also been other personal and public investigations. His villains aren’t cut to any mold, and neither are his cops. Rebus’ offsider, Siobhan Clarke, may play a major or minor part in the stories. And even though some of the other officers consider Rebus a ‘dinosaur’, he usually sorts the villain(s) out, one way or the other. They may not always get convicted, but they certainly know that Rebus knows they did the deed.
Rebus himself is a dour character in some respects, though he has a great sense of wit. He’s constantly unsettled, and doesn’t sleep well. His personal relationships suffer badly from his obsession with getting his job done, and his life is often in peril because of the risks he takes. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He’s regarded as something of a rogue cop by his superiors, yet they don’t regard him as so much of one that they’ll finally cause him to quit. He’s too useful, and knows too much. Too much for his own good, in some cases, as when he’s so close to one of the villains in order to get even closer to another, that it’s almost uncertain which side he’s playing for. And he’s willing to act a part to get information that isn’t otherwise unobtainable.

John Hannah played Rebus in some of the tv versions of the books. I can't imagine someone less like the character; he's far too young, for a start.

Rankin and Ratatouille

Finished Ian Rankin’s Set in Darkness whilst¹ on holiday, all 463 pages of it. Admittedly that’s the mass market edition, but it’s quite a read still, and fairly convoluted. In spite of all the plots and sub-plots (it’s never easy to tell which is which in a Rankin story) Rankin keeps a firm grip on things, and the detail in the interrogation/interview scenes is smartly worked out. The story, amongst many other things, concerns a nasty couple of blokes who chase and rape women walking home alone; a skeleton found during the excavations of an historic building; the suicide of an apparently homeless person; and the murder of an up and coming MP. All four connect eventually (one of them not until almost the end) but the murder takes some figuring out, it takes a lot of time to find out who the skeleton ‘belonged’ to, and the suicide doesn’t turn out to be who we expect - and neither does the skeleton. Rankin has surprises up his sleeve throughout - even when it comes to making us feel sympathy for annoying characters.
As always the writing is top quality, the humour occasional but sharp, the characterization excellent, and the ongoing gloomy picture of Edinburgh consistent.

We watched Ratatouille again last night on DVD - we saw it first in Northampton, in the UK. It’s an odd (animated) movie in terms of story. It takes a pretty unlikely premise and for the most part makes it work (a rat with superb abilities to create cuisine is a kind of puppet-master to a young man who has no apparent abilities at all). The human characters are superbly delineated, the rats also. The vividness of the ‘scenery’ is often amazing, as it is in all Pixar films. The vocal characterizations are as always, excellent, though Lou Romano as Linguini, gets a little annoying with his constant self-deprecating tone; it may be more a fault of the script than Romano himself.
Overall it’s not a Pixar that I’d rate as the best - mostly because of the story - (at present my favourite is The Incredibles) but it’s certainly not at the bottom of the pile either.

¹ Use of the word, 'whilst' in favour of 'while' encouraged by number one son.

The Naming of the Dead

I had a cold last week and it was one of those annoying ones where every time you try to do something your nose starts to drip.  So you clear it, and it drips again.  In the end I decided to spend most of one day in bed, and we found one of the Ian Rankin stories I hadn't read as an audio book on the laptop.  It was The Naming of the Dead, which came out in 2006, and is set in 2005, in the tumultuous week in Edinburgh and the surrounding area when the Gleneagles G8 Conference was taking place.  Add to that, at a later point in the story, the London Underground bombings, and you have a canvas broad enough on which to spread marches with people numbering in the hundreds of thousands, activist attacks, insurrections and a city full of policemen from all over the country keeping order and containing people who want to do damage to somebody. With this as his background, Rankin then proceeds to offer up a man falling from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle - is it a suicide, an accident, or a murder? - as well as three murders that are seemingly related to each other: they may indicate a serial killer is on the loose, someone who appears to be working through a list of known rapists or sexual attackers.  Or they may not!

Rebus is the star of the show, as you'd expect, though not in the eyes of several of the other characters, and his accomplice in detective discovery is again Siobhan Clarke, who more than once frets that she'd becoming too much like her mentor, for better or worse.  Like Rebus, she finds it hard to leave well alone, or to work anything like the normal 9-5 hours.  Her parents have a big part to play in the story too, being hippies from way back, people who want to protest at what the G8 are doing.  Big Ger Cafferty returns as well, adding to the mix, stirring up trouble wherever he can, and there is a wide range of other characters, good, bad and devious.  This is a classic Rankin, in which he uses his skill to paint a detailed picture of a city in siege while at the same time giving us a superb detective story.  And better still, the murderer is someone who appears throughout the story but doesn't seem to be in the least likely to be a suspect until late in the book.  This is in marked contrast to the most recent Rebus story, where the murderer seemed to be invisible for most of the time.

I listened to what I thought was almost all of the book, got up the next day intending to listen to the rest - about an hour and half's worth - came to the end of that and found that the book wasn't even half finished.  We had a copy on the shelves that I'd never got round to reading - we also had the rest of the audio book on the laptop as it turned out, but it was in another different folder.  So I was swamped for choice.

Scottish actor, Tom Cotcher

The narrator on the audio book version is Tom Cotcher (as far as I can tell; I haven't got the cover of the CD to hand).  He's narrated a number of the Rebus books and does a superb job with the characterizations of a large cast.  I probably should have allowed myself the time to listen to the rest of the book instead of reading it, but it would have taken me at least another full day to do so, whereas I could fit the reading of it in much more productively around other things.  This is the only problem for me with audio books: I find it hard to just sit and listen to one - I want to be doing something else at the same time.  They're great when you're on a long journey (we listened to a non-Rebus Rankin book - Watchmen - earlier in the year in this way), or when your body just doesn't want to do, or can't manage to do, anything else at all; when you've got a heavy cold, in other words.  And there's always the issue, when you're in bed listening, that you might fall asleep and miss something - this doesn't tend to happen when I'm listening in the car!

Watchmen is one of Rankin's one-off stories.  As far as I know the characters don't appear in any other book.  It's a curious piece about a kind of behind-the-scenes department that's dealing with espionage and such, but the characters in the story seem as much intent on double-crossing their colleagues as attending to their proper business.  It's set in both London and Ireland, and the main character is as unlike Rebus as you can imagine.  A desk-job man, essentially, but forced out into the field, and forced to find courage and initiative he wasn't always aware he had.  He does share with Rebus a certain amount of lack of respect for authority, and a difficulty with his marriage and his student son (though he fares better than Rebus in both these areas), but otherwise he's his own man.

Let it Bleed

I’ve been finding it quite hard to settle down and read anything book-wise since I retired: reading lots of stuff on the Net. But I skim a lot there too.

The books and magazines I’ve got from the Library Bus (which conveniently stops just around the corner from our house every Monday afternoon) have all been pretty much fizzlers, stuff I can't be bothered getting into.

So I’ll just have to go through my own bookshelves and see what I haven’t read – or haven’t read for a long time. In the light of that, I picked up and read Ian Rankin’s Let it bleed over the last couple of days. That was good. It was one of the bunch of Rankin titles we bought and read in England, back in 2007, I think, and by the time it was its turn to be read I’d had enough of Rankin and Rebus for the time being (having read five or six in a row).

It’s a bit shorter than some of his other books, I think, but it’s very fast-paced, and as always there are a heap of things going on and gradually connecting together. It's less gruesome than some of his other stories, which was also a plus. He’s very good at plotting, as well as providing strong characterisations. And he seems to know so much. Seemingly some of his earlier books had police procedural errors – but who would know, except a policeman. By the time this book was written he had someone on hand to check those details.

I’ve obviously read the series all out of order...just looking at Rankin’s (excellent) website, I can see that Let it Bleed comes in the middle somewhere of about twenty Rebus titles, and I’ve read some of the later ones. Not to worry. They’re all fairly self-contained, and you remember as you go along who's who.

Standing in Another Man's Grave

Ian Rankin's latest book features Rebus again, that incorrigible policeman who works as much by hunch and instinct as by the rule book; perhaps more so.  Certainly he "solves" the crime in this story purely by hunch in a way that's a little less than satisfactory for the reader: the murderer comes out of nowhere almost, so that much of the book is about red herrings rather than about pinning down a particular character as the villain.  In fact, many of Rankin's books are more about the characters than about the mystery, although the mysteries can be very intricate.  They aren't really whodunnits in the sense that the reader can work out who murdered someone, but more about peeling back layer upon layer and revealing the corruption at the heart of a particular set of circumstances.  There's quite a bit of that here too, with some of the obvious villains being exposed, a young man revealing himself as more villainous than he first appears, and the presence of Cafferty, that perennial thorn in Rebus's side, who is still pulling strings - though less successfully here than elsewhere because he too, like Rebus, is feeling the effects of old age.

Old age pervades the book, and what Rebus is going to do with his retirement is a major question.  He knows little else besides police work and it obviously energises him.  At the opening he's back working after having officially retired, this time for the underfunded cold case office which is due to be disbanded  at the drop of a hat.  He's also considering reapplying for the force but he's hounded by Malcolm Fox, the main character from the two Complaints books (who appears here rather differently, since we're not in sympathy with him particularly and Rebus certainly isn't).  Fox is out to get Rebus, the man who's broken so many rules in the past, but Rebus is always too wily, too old-school for him.  

The story mostly concerns a missing girl, who may have been murdered.  It's a case Rebus should never have taken on; indeed, he only comes across it by accident, and it's almost by accident that he stumbles across the possibility of a serial killer at work, and the consequences of what that brings.  Rebus has a knack for going outside the boundaries, for insulting people with wit and insouciance, for mentoring Siobhan Clarke, his young police companion from many previous books, even though she's never quite sure if his style of mentoring is satisfactory. (Fox definitely doesn't think it is.)   He can undercut authority without blinking and keeps the pompous in their place.  He's a rich character and it's not surprising Rankin has given him yet another outing after implying he wouldn't write any more books about him. 

There's an enormous amount of chasing around the countryside in this one - Rebus, in particular, spends a lot of time on the road following up hunches - and Rankin delights in describing the nature of the different areas, in describing the traffic snarl-ups and the queues and the road works and the huge trucks getting in everyone's way.  He plainly has a love-hate relationship with Scotland and its traffic.   You almost need a map beside you to keep tabs on all the shifting scenes. In fact it might help to make more sense of how much driving Rebus actually does, sometimes alone and sometimes with others and where he's going.  Maybe I'll do that next time I read the book!

Peters and Rankin

I came across some of Ellis Peters' non-Brother Cadfael murder mysteries at an op shop in Devonport the other day, none of which I'd read or seen before. Decided to start with A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. It's an Inspector Felse mystery, though since he's on holiday with his family in this one his detective work is minimal. The plot is neat enough, with a few surprises, though I thought I'd figured out the villain early on, and for once was right. Except that things weren't quite as they seemed, and Peters had one or two twists up her sleeve before the end.
The dialogue made things seem very dated - it was written in 1965. Perhaps the most curious thing was having both the 18-year-old and the 15-year-old boys in the story call their respective mothers Mummy.  Even among the middle-classes of that period I would have thought this was a little odd.  In this book the characters don't seem to have distinctive voices, and sometimes when Peters doesn't qualify who's speaking, you can't actually tell who's speaking from what's being said. It seems that it takes a much stronger character, like Cadfael, to lift the bar for Peters.  In the Cadfael books it's generally seemed to me that most of the characters had personality - as opposed to having it described. I find this with Agatha Christie too.  If one of her strong characters, such as Poirot, or Miss Marple, is missing, the tone of the dialogue goes downhill.  These strong characters somehow make the other characters take on more life.  Of course there are Christie books in which nothing comes alive, but they aren't the majority.
I finished reading another book I picked up secondhand, last night: Ian Rankin's Doors Open. Compared to the more well-known Rebus books (Rebus is another character who lifts everything around him) this is largely a lightweight story, though it has an intricate plot and some considerable violence towards the end.  But it shows that Rankin isn't going to die as an author if he's not writing about Rebus. Still, the main character here isn't as rounded as Rebus, and he and the other characters are mostly subservient to the plot. The characters aren't memorable, as Rebus is, but they do well enough given their own room to play in, and the story is very entertaining, especially the way in which the professional criminal (as opposed to the amateurs he's surrounded by) keeps us guessing as to whether he's actually got a heart with a leaning towards culture or not.
The plot centres around an improbable heist - pinching reasonably famous, and certainly valuable, paintings from the storage warehouse belonging to Scotland's National Gallery, replacing them with fakes and then pretending there was no actual heist at all. Of course it all unravels, and the best part of the book is seeing how the various individuals react to the unravelling.  If you've had enough of gloomy Rebus for the time being (and when you think you have you find you can still take more of him) try this one out.  You'll read it in great gulps.

This year's reading

In a recent post I mentioned that Salesman in Beijing was the last book to make it onto the list of books I've read in 2009 - which made me consider posting the rest of the books. So here they are, in the order they were read. Those in italics are fiction; the rest are non.

It's a fairly eclectic list; some of the novels were read for reviewing (for the Otago Daily Times), and the non-fiction titles tend to lean towards the areas in which I'm interested (not necessarily those in which I actually know a lot about the subject). Some of the books didn't get finished, but they'll only be on this list if I got through a fair chunk of them. There were heaps of other books, non-starters that I thought would be interesting and weren't, or that I just didn't get far through because some other more interesting book came along. Plus, this year, I had to read and re-read some text books for my course, and a number of other books that I dipped into for reference. Most of those don't appear here.

This year is perhaps notable for the number of books that I've read for the second (or third) time; I read somewhere about a person spending a year reading just the books she had on her shelves; I haven't made a conscious effort to do this, but I have re-read several that I had 'in stock.'

Since I started checking through this list again, I find there are at least two books that I've had to add because they got missed out. Weird. (The links are to reviews and blog posts I've written on the books.)

Knots and Crosses – Ian Rankin – 3.1.09
The Drunkard’s Walk – Leonard Mlodinow – 15.1.09
The Horse and His Boy (reread)– C S Lewis – 16.1.09
Set in Darkness – Ian Rankin – 25.1.09
Gilead (reread) – Marilynne Robinson – 29.1.09

Evil and the Justice of God (two-thirds) – N T Wright – 9.2.09
Reason for God – Tim Keller – 10.2.09
The Novice’s Tale – Margaret Frazer – 12.2.09
Extreme Weather Events – Tim Jones – 25.2.09
The Last Battle (re-read) – C S Lewis – 28.2.09

When we are Married (play) – J B Priestley – 2.3.09
Soul Survivor (re-read)– Philip Yancey – March 09

The Third Peacock (re-read) – Robert Farrar Capon – 8.4.09
Flashback Forward (well-skimmed) – John Cairney – 10.4.09
Twilight – Stephenie Meyer – 10.4.09
The Hunting of the Divine Fox – Robert Farrar Capon – 19.4.09
Digital filmmaking – Mike Figgis – 26.4.09
Creative Interviewing (mostly read) – Jack Douglas – 26.4.09

Sins of the Father – Fleur Beale – 7.5.09
Awakening – S J Bolton – May 09

Easy Virtue (play) – Noel Coward – 3.6.09
Readings for the Research Methods course – various dates.
Tzigane (play) – John Vakidis - 8.6.09
Leaving Church – Barbara Brown Taylor – June 2009
Original Sin – Alan Jacobs – June 2009
Fear and Polemic In Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter And Antinomianism – Tim Cooper – (3/4 read) – June 2009

Anthony Trollope – James Pope Hennessey – 11.7.09

Just Take My Heart – Mary Clark Higgins – 3.8.09
Embracing the Wide Sky – David Tammet – 4.8.09
When in Rome – Ngaio Marsh – 14.8.09
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton – abridged audio book version – 15.8.09
The Seven Dials Mystery – Agatha Christie – 17.8.09

Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies – Blake Snyder – 1.9.09
Reason for God – Tim Keller (re-read) – 7.9.09
People’s Train – Tom Keneally – 12.9.09
The Consciousness Plague – Paul Levinson – 18.9.09
A Week in December – Sebastian Faulks – 21.9.09
Finding Sanctuary – Abbot Christopher Jamieson – 25.9.09
Save the Cat – the last book on screenwriting you’ll ever need – Blake Snyder – 27.9.09

Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass on Tour – Adrian Plass – 11.10.09
Transmigration of Timothy Archer – Philip K Dick – 11.10.09
Somebody Loves Us All - Damien Wilkins - Nov 09
Performer as Priest and Prophet – Rock & Mealy – 17.10.09
A Kiss before the Apocalypse – Thomas Sniegoski – 21.10.09
The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy – Barbara Vine – 25.10.09
The Champion – Maurice Gee – 29.10.09

Supervision in the Helping Professions - ? – 1.11.09 (two-thirds finished – recalled to library)
The Complaints – Ian Rankin – 2.11.09
To Heaven, with Scribes and Pharisees – Lionel Blue – 14.11.09
The Big Picture – Tom Reilly – 29.11.09

And it was good – Madeleine L’Engle – 2.12.09
A little exercise for young Theologians – Helmut Thielicke – 2.12.09
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J K Rowling (re-read) – 8.12.09
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – J K Rowling (re-read) – 17.12.09
SuperFreakonomics – Levitt and Dubner – 28.12.09
Salesman in Beijing – Arthur Miller – 31.12.09

Exit Lines

Reginald Hill was a prolific writer (he died last year) who not only produced some 24 very popular titles featuring the policemen, Dalziel (pronounced, roughly, De-el) and Pascoe, but more than 30 other books, some of them under the pseudonyms Patrick Ruel and Charles Underhill.  He wrote mysteries and adventure stories and historical pieces and sci-fi.  He also used varying structural conceits - one of the later Dalziel and Pascoe titles is written with a kind of Jane Austen language and thought - and the books are full of wit, literary references, words that no one in normal life uses, but seem apt for the occasion ('a reboant cantillation of obscene abuse', 'a usefully cunctatory bout of coughing'), crafty plotting, and superbly humorous insights into his characters. These are all mixed with ordinary everyday language, and the books shouldn't be thought of as inaccessible to the average reader.  It doesn't matter if you don't know what a reboant cantillation is - you'll get the idea from the context.  Hill once said: "When I get up in the morning, I ask my wife whether I should write a Booker prize-winning novel, or another bestselling crime book. We always come down on the side of the crime book."

I hadn't read anything of his until this year - there are always more authors around than you can manage to keep up with, even in a dozen lifetimes - and I started off with his book of short stories,  There are no ghosts in the Soviet Union, which we'd picked up secondhand somewhere.  The long title story is superbly written - a ghost story that works down to the last detail.  Some of the other stories are odd - one of them takes a Dalziel and Pascoe novel (one that's been filmed as part of the television series), takes us behind the scenes of the fictional television filming of the book, and makes the actor playing Pascoe a pompous self-centred ass, who, with some hasty rewriting of the script, gradually pushes Dalziel into a very minor role. Hill turns up as a character as well, the increasingly angry author who sees his popular story being turned into nonsense.

The only other Hill novel I'd had any contact with was Exit Lines, which I'd twice heard on CD while travelling to and from Christchurch.  When I say 'twice heard' I mean that the first time I heard about the first 60 pages, and then didn't hear any more, and then on a second trip, heard about 90 pages, and still didn't hear any more. So rather than trying to listen to the rest - I'm not good at just sitting listening to CDs unless I'm lying in bed sick - I bought a copy of the book, started it yesterday and finished it today. It's immensely readable, often very funny, and has a complex plot that Ian Rankin could easily have put together. The big difference is that Rankin's pervading gloom doesn't colour everything, and even though Dalziel may be on a par with Rebus when it comes to drinking too much for his own good, and may have a temper and sharp tongue to match his Scottish counterpart, there's such wit and humour from both the characters and the author, that you know you're in a different kind of world.

There's a strong theme of the difficulties of old age - people with Alzheimer's or trying to live on their own without family - and also the horror that many young people have for the idea of growing old. The story begins with the deaths of three old men, in fact; two of them may be accidents, the third appears to be the result of an attack. Nothing is quite like it seems, and the further the story goes, the more our original views about the deaths and their aftermaths are altered.  There are some wonderfully innocent people, and some surprisingly devious ones.  There are some that appear suspicious and aren't, and some that appear to be all above board - and aren't. Hill holds out attention right to the end, even though we think we've got to grips with what's going on at an earlier point. 

There are an endless number of lines that could be quoted (one character, Mrs Spillings, is almost Dickensian in her speeches), but Hill reserves some of his best lines for the taciturn, and ugly, policemen, Wield (a regular in the series of books). 

'Back door,' said Wield. 'Glass panel broken. Key in lock. Hand through. Open. Easy.'

Sergeant Wield was in fine telegraphic style.  He also seemed to have been practising not moving his lips, so that the words came out of his slant and ugly face like a ritual chant through a primitive devil-mask.

or

Wield looked at the new acquisition and raised his eyebrows, producing an effect not unlike the vernal shifting of some Arctic landscape as the sun sets an ice-bound river flowing once more through a waste of snows.

 

McIlvanney's Laidlaw, some quotes

A few short extracts from William McIlvanney's Laidlaw, a book full of witty writing. Laidlaw is the first in a series featuring a Scottish detective named Laidlaw. He's a man with a similar approach to his detecting as Rebus has in the famous Ian Rankin series. These stories were written earlier than those by Rankin and are set in Glasgow, rather than Edinburgh. The other two titles are The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded. 

Sunday in the park - it was a nice day. A Glasgow sun was out, dully luminous, an eye with cataract. Some people were in the park pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer.

The scene was a kind of Method School of Weather - a lot of people trying to achieve a subjective belief in the heat in the hope of convincing one another. So the father who lay on the grass, railing in his children with his eyes, wore an open-necked shirt, letting the sun get at his goose-pimples. Two girls who were being chatted up by three boys managed to look romantically breeze-blown rather than cold. An old man sitting on a bench had undone the top two buttons of his overcoat, heralding heatwave. A transistor played somewhere, evocative of beaches. People walking through the park moved unhurriedly, as if through an air muggy with warmth.  page 23

Just because you've got a wooden leg doesn't mean you've got to go about battering all the two-legged folk over the head with it.  page 167

What I've got against folk like Lawson isn't that they're wrong. It's just that they assume they're right. Bigotry's just unearned certainty, isn't it?  Page 200

Hard-earned cash

In one of the Ian Rankin books I've been reading he talks about immigrants trying to make a living by selling stuff on the streets - often without a hawker's license. In Italy, particularly, Asians and Africans are everywhere selling stuff. We saw one lot of Asians get their goods confiscated by the police in Milan in the Metro, and anything up to a dozen Africans will be outside most tourist spots selling leather goods. They can't make much money out of doing this, and presumably they've got to pay their 'boss', whoever that may be, for the goods in the first place. Seems like a very tough way to live.

Scotland's other drink

In the Ian Rankin novels featuring Inspector Rebus that we've been reading while on holiday, he keeps mentioning Irn-Bru. Finally we looked it up on the Net, because it's obviously a drink, but that's about all we knew. Seemingly it was originally called Iron Brew, and somewhere along the line the name has been squashed. It's Scotland's other national drink (other than whiskey, that is) and is more popular than Coca Cola. It's actually a soft drink, not an alcoholic one, and it's....orange.

Exit Music

While we were touring around over the last couple of weeks, I dropped into a few secondhand bookshops (and one or two new book shops, as well).  In Picton, if I remember correctly, I found a very good secondhand bookshop and a proprietor happy to talk at length if I'd so desired.  He had a copy of Ian Rankin's Exit Music, originally intended to the the last in the Rebus series.  We had this on CD, but I'd never listened to it, so I got the trade paperback he had in stock.

Having just read the most recent Rebus book, Standing in Another Man's Grave, in which Rebus, although officially retired, is in no way devoid of his usual energy and insight, it was a bit odd to go back a step and see him preparing for imminent retirement.  Like the latest book, hinges on a huge red herring, though in saying that, the red herring here is actually a vital part of how the book works itself out, rather more so than in the most recent story.

In the first chapter the body of a Russian poet is found on the street in Edinburgh, and everyone who appears in the story - and I mean everyone - is in some way involved with this man, from politicians to small time crooks, from drug addicts to pushers, from academics to bankers.  Not a soul is outside the ever-widening circle of people who are affected.  It's so well written it would easily have made a fitting climax to the Rebus series, and Rebus himself is in fine form - ageing  but not old; sarcastic but witty, anti-authoritarian yet endeavouring to train the younger police officers to respect the right channels.  He knows from his own career how difficult it is to go against the flow.

There's a lot of warmth in this book; more than in some of the Rebus stories.  There's minimal violence - apart from the murder(s) obviously - though the arch villain Big Ger Cafferty comes a bit of a cropper, much to Rebus' annoyance (!)  It's the sort of cropper that could see Cafferty die before he pays his dues.  Rebus would much prefer that he's put behind bars legitimately.

Perhaps, having read the two most recent Rebus titles back to front, I should continue in the same vein, and read through the series again, in reverse!

Failure, success, sex and evolution

Many of life's failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Edison, source unknown, but quoted on page 216 0f The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow.

The Drunkard's Walk has the distinction of being the first book I read and actually finished in 2009. (Finished an Ian Rankin, but I think I started that in 2008.)

It's a fascinating book on stats, randomness, chance, the way in which ability doesn't necessarily equate to success (perseverance is more likely to, I think). The stats side of it fits in with what I've read on stats and what I do at work in relation to them - and is helpful in clarifying some of the issues with stats. Stats are useful, but they're never the last word.
The way in which randomness isn't quite as random as we like to think is another intriguing outcome of the book, and our willingness to turn a number of random acts into a pattern is another factor we need to take into account.

And in relation to this, here's another quote, this time from Will Catton, a PhD student from the University of Otago, (Dunedin, NZ) who won an essay prize for a piece called: Progress, Laughter, Sex - but not in that order. It was published in the latest NZ Listener magazine dated January 17, 2009

But the idea that sex is essentially a way of shuffling genes misses much of its real significance to biological progress. A spicy new source of amazingness was involved in the lives of your sexual ancestors: the amazingness of their each convincing some other ancestor of yours to fandango. The more finicky those other ancestors were, the more impressive this familial achievement becomes. Evolutionary success, for a sexual beast, is tested by the mating choices of the rest of the species as much as by survival. So sex is the species' biology grabbing the reins on its own evolution. Such control does create new dangers. Fashion is fickle: the peacock's tail, just like hammer pants and the 'hypothetical' speculative housing market, may well be in for a bumpy devaluation. But the immensely beneficial trade-off is this: a sexual species' evolution can be directed with all the subtlety of its members' ability to perceive one another. Sizzling health is nature's oldest aphrodisiac.

Catton is obviously in love with language, which might account for why some of this seems to make less sense than first appears. But the general idea is good.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Paul Torday’s debut novel makes me intensely jealous. There is no way I could ever get a first novel off the ground with such wit and humour, such intelligence and satire. But then I’m not Torday, and I’m not writing a first novel about a most odd subject.
I just finished this book today. It’s had some mixed reviews around the globe, but I found it perfectly charming. It doesn’t go far in any direction: the aspects of faith aren’t pushed so far that they become unbelievable (although obviously some grumpy secularist reviewers thought they were); the romance aspect is quietly handled, and there’s no shattering of marriages or sudden changes of direction for the characters; the use of various official papers and private notes and letters is hardly a new approach, but Torday handles it pretty well (except when he decided to put some sections out of sequence, something that didn’t strike me as necessary); the characters are more sharply drawn than some reviewers believed (probably the same secularists again); and though we don’t have dramatic scenes in the sense of characters playing off against each other (well, pretty rarely) because everything is told somewhat at one remove, we do have a competent approach to the action that does happen.
And then there’s all the stuff about salmon fishing. I don’t know that this book will convert a whole pile of readers into salmon fishers, but it won’t put them off either. The fishing side of things is interesting, and there’s just enough of it at any time. This avoids making the reader think: this isn’t a novel, it’s a fishing manual.
I found this book in a Valencia bookshop: I was desperate for something to read because my wife was taking so long to finish the fifth Ian Rankin, and Torday’s book was the only thing that looked worth a try. It was worth a try, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, reading it in two days - unfortunately. And my wife still hasn’t finished with Inspector Rebus.

Here are some short extracts from the book:
In the first, the main character, Fred has had a bit of an argument with his so-superior wife, who always expects everything to be on her terms.
“The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night. A relatively rare event in our marriage of late.
Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit.’” (Page 30)

Later Fred is having a meal with the Sheikh whose idea it is to enable his people to fish for salmon in the Yemen, and he tells Fred:
“’I regret to see your sadness, Dr Alfred. I would rather see you with an untroubled spirit and with your whole heart and mind bent upon our project. You need to learn to have faith, Dr Alfred. We believe that faith is the cure that heals all troubles. Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love.”’ (Page 139)

Much later, Fred reflects on this:
“I thought about the sheikh saying, although I could not remember his exact words, ‘Without faith, there is no hope. Without faith, there is no love.’
Then in a moment, in that vast space of rocks and sky and scorching sun, I understood that he had not meant religious faith, not exactly. He was not urging me to become a Muslim or to believe in one interpretation of God rather than another. He knew me for what I was, an old, cold, cautious scientist. That was what I was then. And he was simply pointing out to me the first step to take. The word he had used was faith, but what he meant was belief. The first step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that step. At long last I understood.
I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the first step away from a world which only recognised what it could count, measure, sell or buy. The people here [in the Yemen] still had that innocent power of belief: not the angry denial of other people’s belief of religious fanatics, but a quiet affirmation. That was what I sensed here, in this land and in this place, which made it so different from home. It was not the clothes, not the language, not the customs, not the sense of being in another century. It was none of these. It was the pervading sense of belief. “ (Page 281)