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LXIV:Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead (2006)
Located, perhaps appropriately, in the homeless charity shop just before Wombtide, and raising the possibility of having read all the Rebus novels in a year. On the other hand, it meant having to take Exit Lines to Newcastle with me, and this if I hadn't finished it. Despite an unexpected hour in a coffee shop, waiting for a drinking companion, this indeed did happen.
Whilst this is very interesting, I'm not convinced this works, as what I assume to be Rankin's politics clash with those of his characters. Rebus is clearly pro-law - I suspect in an almost Calvinist sense of right or wrong, but still with demons to fight - but is anti-authority to the extent that they ignore or flout the law. Think Vimes but without the social progression through marriage. His mentee, Siobhan Clarke, may well have less cynicism, but is an outsider to Edinburgh and an incomer to Scotland, and perhaps more clinging to notions of authority. On the other hand, she has been shaped by Rebus so is likely to be sympathetic with his worldview.
Drop these two characters into an Edinburgh divided by the G8 negotiations, and waiting for another shoe to drop after the 7/7 bombing. Clarke's parents are representative of the anti-war protests of the ordinary person - and the injuring of one of them leads Clarke to question the actions of the police, but only on a few bad apples model. I'm not convinced Rankin has the characters to make the points I feel he wants to make here; the complexity of real life collide with the geometry (yes, the rebus) of generic crime fiction.
The main plot involves the apparent suicide of an MP at the Castle, which Rebus, nearing retirment, is being warned off. Meanwhile a serial killer is targetting former offenders listed on a website. Rebus and Clarke raise hackles and are suspended from their cases as they tred on one toe too many.
The crime narrative works fine, and the first fictional draft of history is interesting, but I don't think the characters quite think what Rankin wants them to. (I am aware this is a circular argument - I think Rankin thinks a particular way, and may be wrong.)
LXV: Ian Rankin, Exit Lines (2007)
We reach the end of the Rebus novels, at least those written in real time, and there are threads to be tied up after Rebus's retirement, not least Clarke's future career (and spin-off a la Lewis?) and Big Ger. The two dinosaurs have to fight one more time. Will Rankin kill Rebus off literally? Well, I live in the real world (ish) and I knew the answer to that from reviewers such as Mark Bloody Lawson, but how to get to retirement?
A Russian poet is found murdered in a car park - perhaps a random mugging, perhaps the assassination of an embarrassment to the home country. Rebus and Clarke's investigation begins rubbing up people the wrong way, and Rebus is suspended from duty until his last day, and has to pull strings from behind the scenes, risking the careers of several of his colleagues.
It suddenly stikes me that - with two novels on the trot suspending Rebus - we are being set up for Private Eye Rebus, as he hardly needs the machinery of his trade any more. And I walked past the murder scene on my first night in Edinburgh.
I think, in the end, I'm a little disappointed in the series - I'd had more of a sense of the character struggling with demons, but these mostly take place off stage. He starts or finishes relationships but, aside from Clarke, we don't quite get inside them as they occur between books. There's the recurring figure of his daughter, but she falls into just a mention by the end of the series. That being said, clearly a great creation, and a series of gripping and readable novels.
Time to read the Morse boxset?
LXV: Sally Miller Gearheart, The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1979)
A book it is easier to see the point of, and justification for, than to enjoy, expecially as a male reading thirty years later. Here the battle of the sexes has led to an apartheid of humanity, with males more or less confined to cities, and impotent as soon as they leave them, with women in small enclaves in the countryside, in telepathic harmony with nature. (Nature is not red in tooth and claw, but animals can apparently negotiate being eaten.) It perhaps has not dated well.
The book is a series of vignettes rather than a straightforward through narrative, although there is a sense of an increasing number of men emerging from cities to raid for women, and a slow revelation of the prehistory of the novel. It makes more sense in the context of the zenith of separatist feminism - in the context of Brownmiller arguing about men being structured as rapist, and Dworkin not-quite-saying that intercourse in marriage is rape - but in the current climate it risks being as essentialist as the chauvinist, sexist ideology it is resisting. I can see why the anger of the 1970s could lead to the book.
Poetically written, and some nice touches, but I fear I'm not the target audience for the book anyway.
LXVI: Wendy Loncaster (and Malcolm Shields), Above All, the Sky: Walter Goodin (2008)
We'd gone into the Ferens to see a Tracey Emin piece, but were distracted by a twentieth-century watercolourist (of whom I had not heard), best known for views of the Yorkshire Wolds, Bridlington and Beverley: Walter Goodin (1907-1992). I don't have a huge taste for mainly representative art, and the Ferens has a great collection of British surrealism (and some interesting Dutch stuff, alongside dull boats and nineteenth-century yawnfests), but I enjoyed the Goodin.
In part the familiarity of the views - the Minster, the city landscape - and the sense of lost places - the quay when it was a dock, the Second World War, old factories. There were a variety of styles on display, from distinctly Constable pastoral to impressionist houses and gardens. A very impressive portrait of a figure in almost darkness and (uniquely?) of someone making a porkpie. The patronage of Reckitts suggests some of the subject matter - but Table Mountain and the Sydney Harbour Bridge were taken from photographs.
The book is a good record of the exhibition - it lacks a few of the paintings - but doesn't quite get beyond the biographical into the critical.
So, 66 books in 2008, which I suspect is up on recent years, but in 2009 I want - and need - to get that up to over a hundred. That may be why I have five books on the go at once and haven't finished any of them.
Located, perhaps appropriately, in the homeless charity shop just before Wombtide, and raising the possibility of having read all the Rebus novels in a year. On the other hand, it meant having to take Exit Lines to Newcastle with me, and this if I hadn't finished it. Despite an unexpected hour in a coffee shop, waiting for a drinking companion, this indeed did happen.
Whilst this is very interesting, I'm not convinced this works, as what I assume to be Rankin's politics clash with those of his characters. Rebus is clearly pro-law - I suspect in an almost Calvinist sense of right or wrong, but still with demons to fight - but is anti-authority to the extent that they ignore or flout the law. Think Vimes but without the social progression through marriage. His mentee, Siobhan Clarke, may well have less cynicism, but is an outsider to Edinburgh and an incomer to Scotland, and perhaps more clinging to notions of authority. On the other hand, she has been shaped by Rebus so is likely to be sympathetic with his worldview.
Drop these two characters into an Edinburgh divided by the G8 negotiations, and waiting for another shoe to drop after the 7/7 bombing. Clarke's parents are representative of the anti-war protests of the ordinary person - and the injuring of one of them leads Clarke to question the actions of the police, but only on a few bad apples model. I'm not convinced Rankin has the characters to make the points I feel he wants to make here; the complexity of real life collide with the geometry (yes, the rebus) of generic crime fiction.
The main plot involves the apparent suicide of an MP at the Castle, which Rebus, nearing retirment, is being warned off. Meanwhile a serial killer is targetting former offenders listed on a website. Rebus and Clarke raise hackles and are suspended from their cases as they tred on one toe too many.
The crime narrative works fine, and the first fictional draft of history is interesting, but I don't think the characters quite think what Rankin wants them to. (I am aware this is a circular argument - I think Rankin thinks a particular way, and may be wrong.)
LXV: Ian Rankin, Exit Lines (2007)
We reach the end of the Rebus novels, at least those written in real time, and there are threads to be tied up after Rebus's retirement, not least Clarke's future career (and spin-off a la Lewis?) and Big Ger. The two dinosaurs have to fight one more time. Will Rankin kill Rebus off literally? Well, I live in the real world (ish) and I knew the answer to that from reviewers such as Mark Bloody Lawson, but how to get to retirement?
A Russian poet is found murdered in a car park - perhaps a random mugging, perhaps the assassination of an embarrassment to the home country. Rebus and Clarke's investigation begins rubbing up people the wrong way, and Rebus is suspended from duty until his last day, and has to pull strings from behind the scenes, risking the careers of several of his colleagues.
It suddenly stikes me that - with two novels on the trot suspending Rebus - we are being set up for Private Eye Rebus, as he hardly needs the machinery of his trade any more. And I walked past the murder scene on my first night in Edinburgh.
I think, in the end, I'm a little disappointed in the series - I'd had more of a sense of the character struggling with demons, but these mostly take place off stage. He starts or finishes relationships but, aside from Clarke, we don't quite get inside them as they occur between books. There's the recurring figure of his daughter, but she falls into just a mention by the end of the series. That being said, clearly a great creation, and a series of gripping and readable novels.
Time to read the Morse boxset?
LXV: Sally Miller Gearheart, The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1979)
A book it is easier to see the point of, and justification for, than to enjoy, expecially as a male reading thirty years later. Here the battle of the sexes has led to an apartheid of humanity, with males more or less confined to cities, and impotent as soon as they leave them, with women in small enclaves in the countryside, in telepathic harmony with nature. (Nature is not red in tooth and claw, but animals can apparently negotiate being eaten.) It perhaps has not dated well.
The book is a series of vignettes rather than a straightforward through narrative, although there is a sense of an increasing number of men emerging from cities to raid for women, and a slow revelation of the prehistory of the novel. It makes more sense in the context of the zenith of separatist feminism - in the context of Brownmiller arguing about men being structured as rapist, and Dworkin not-quite-saying that intercourse in marriage is rape - but in the current climate it risks being as essentialist as the chauvinist, sexist ideology it is resisting. I can see why the anger of the 1970s could lead to the book.
Poetically written, and some nice touches, but I fear I'm not the target audience for the book anyway.
LXVI: Wendy Loncaster (and Malcolm Shields), Above All, the Sky: Walter Goodin (2008)
We'd gone into the Ferens to see a Tracey Emin piece, but were distracted by a twentieth-century watercolourist (of whom I had not heard), best known for views of the Yorkshire Wolds, Bridlington and Beverley: Walter Goodin (1907-1992). I don't have a huge taste for mainly representative art, and the Ferens has a great collection of British surrealism (and some interesting Dutch stuff, alongside dull boats and nineteenth-century yawnfests), but I enjoyed the Goodin.
In part the familiarity of the views - the Minster, the city landscape - and the sense of lost places - the quay when it was a dock, the Second World War, old factories. There were a variety of styles on display, from distinctly Constable pastoral to impressionist houses and gardens. A very impressive portrait of a figure in almost darkness and (uniquely?) of someone making a porkpie. The patronage of Reckitts suggests some of the subject matter - but Table Mountain and the Sydney Harbour Bridge were taken from photographs.
The book is a good record of the exhibition - it lacks a few of the paintings - but doesn't quite get beyond the biographical into the critical.
So, 66 books in 2008, which I suspect is up on recent years, but in 2009 I want - and need - to get that up to over a hundred. That may be why I have five books on the go at once and haven't finished any of them.
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