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Fleshmarket Close
I was interested to note in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wellinghall's recent post about popular libary books that Fleshmarket Close by Iain Rankin was in the top ten and was, in fact, the only Rankin book to appear in the top ten. Does that mean people think it is the best Rankin? or just that its reached some optimal point past publication that suddenly everyone starts borrowing it from the library?
Fleshmarket Close is, I think, one of the better John Rebus books (Rebus being Rankin's Edinburgh detective, for the uninitiated). It's major weakness is that it relies on three cases coincidentally linking together - while I'll generally forgive two cases suddenly turning out to be linked* my patience gets stretched at three. I think I read in a writing manual somewhere that the reader will always allow you one coincidence but not two, and that appears to be the case in point here.
However I don't really read Rebus books for the plot, so long as its reasonably coherent I'm happy, I read them for Rebus himself and the Edinburgh he inhabits which is almost a character in its own right. Rebus is on form in Fleshmarket Close, in so far as an alcholic misanthropist with an instinctively vicious approach to justice can be said to be on form. I mean vicious not in the Judge Dredd beat-em-up kind of way though I'm sure Rebus wouldn't object to playing judge and jury as well as policeman. Rebus appears to have relatively little interest in making wrongdoers suffer physically, but he wants them to suffer. There is a particularly chilling moment in Fleshmarket Close where he takes a kind of revenge on the adminstrator of a detention centre for illegal imigrants. He suspects strongly that this man is involved in forced labour gangs but he also holds him to an extent to blame as the representative of the entire way in which the UK treats illegal immigrants. There is also a woman who Rebus is trying to impress. It's a complex moment for Rebus and demonstrates, in many ways, his inability to view things in the abstract - he doesn't rail against the system and has no particularly strong feeling about immigrants in general, but given some specific immigrants whom he feels to be ill-treated, and a face for the system then he shows little mercy and gives no quarter. I make Rebus sound like a difficult character to like, and I suspect he would be extremely difficult to like in real life, but on the page we see inside his head enough to empathise and to appreciate his dogged determination to mete out some sort of justice.
As for Rebus' Edinburgh, well part of my interest, of course, is having lived there though I always feel that Rebus views the city through a glass darkly. I didn't exactly live in tourist Edinburgh but I lived in genteel academic Marchmont. Reading a Rebus novel is like visiting somewhere similar but both different and darker to the place I knew which makes it an oddly nostalgic experience.
Those library reading figures suggest maybe this is a good "first" Rebus novel. I don't know. Rebus is never a particularly approachable character and this probably isn't the tightest Rebus novel in plot terms, but his side-kick Siobahn is more accessible and this book continues the trend established in the last couple of giving her a far more central role in proceedings and showing more of the proceedings through her point of view... and there have certainly been flabbier plots in the series as well.
* just as well, really, otherwise my enjoyment of CSI, and CSI:New York would be much impaired. "Do you mean to say your case is my case?" gets uttered nearly every other week.
wellinghall's recent post about popular libary books that Fleshmarket Close by Iain Rankin was in the top ten and was, in fact, the only Rankin book to appear in the top ten. Does that mean people think it is the best Rankin? or just that its reached some optimal point past publication that suddenly everyone starts borrowing it from the library?Fleshmarket Close is, I think, one of the better John Rebus books (Rebus being Rankin's Edinburgh detective, for the uninitiated). It's major weakness is that it relies on three cases coincidentally linking together - while I'll generally forgive two cases suddenly turning out to be linked* my patience gets stretched at three. I think I read in a writing manual somewhere that the reader will always allow you one coincidence but not two, and that appears to be the case in point here.
However I don't really read Rebus books for the plot, so long as its reasonably coherent I'm happy, I read them for Rebus himself and the Edinburgh he inhabits which is almost a character in its own right. Rebus is on form in Fleshmarket Close, in so far as an alcholic misanthropist with an instinctively vicious approach to justice can be said to be on form. I mean vicious not in the Judge Dredd beat-em-up kind of way though I'm sure Rebus wouldn't object to playing judge and jury as well as policeman. Rebus appears to have relatively little interest in making wrongdoers suffer physically, but he wants them to suffer. There is a particularly chilling moment in Fleshmarket Close where he takes a kind of revenge on the adminstrator of a detention centre for illegal imigrants. He suspects strongly that this man is involved in forced labour gangs but he also holds him to an extent to blame as the representative of the entire way in which the UK treats illegal immigrants. There is also a woman who Rebus is trying to impress. It's a complex moment for Rebus and demonstrates, in many ways, his inability to view things in the abstract - he doesn't rail against the system and has no particularly strong feeling about immigrants in general, but given some specific immigrants whom he feels to be ill-treated, and a face for the system then he shows little mercy and gives no quarter. I make Rebus sound like a difficult character to like, and I suspect he would be extremely difficult to like in real life, but on the page we see inside his head enough to empathise and to appreciate his dogged determination to mete out some sort of justice.
As for Rebus' Edinburgh, well part of my interest, of course, is having lived there though I always feel that Rebus views the city through a glass darkly. I didn't exactly live in tourist Edinburgh but I lived in genteel academic Marchmont. Reading a Rebus novel is like visiting somewhere similar but both different and darker to the place I knew which makes it an oddly nostalgic experience.
Those library reading figures suggest maybe this is a good "first" Rebus novel. I don't know. Rebus is never a particularly approachable character and this probably isn't the tightest Rebus novel in plot terms, but his side-kick Siobahn is more accessible and this book continues the trend established in the last couple of giving her a far more central role in proceedings and showing more of the proceedings through her point of view... and there have certainly been flabbier plots in the series as well.
* just as well, really, otherwise my enjoyment of CSI, and CSI:New York would be much impaired. "Do you mean to say your case is my case?" gets uttered nearly every other week.