Books (2)

I imagine individual books of series must be harder to review more than a few times. Part of the attraction and pleasure of any series is surely the sense of repetition. Going in, you mostly know you're going to meet familiar characters, since that's how most series are constructed. Or even just the familiarity of an author's style and way of seeing the world.

Ian Rankin, Black and Blue

I first heard about Ian Rankin a bit before he got quite as famous and successful as he now has. It was probably an article written on the cusp of that success, as he was about to break through to wider attention. And from the article, it sounded great. I never read a great deal of crime fiction when I was growing up. Probably the first crime series I read was James Sallis' Lew Griffin novels which have a somewhat oblique relationship with the genre, being much more about the character of the detective and his memories of events and less uninterested in things like the crime or indeed plot. If Lew goes out to find a missing person for example, he doesn't always find them.

But Rankin sounded worth investigating. Crime fiction, yes, but somehow a modern Scottish Balzac (not that I've ever read Balzac, mind). Dutifully I started at the beginning with the first and found myself rather disappointed. Rankin has admitted himself that he never intended to write crime fiction, rather falling into the series after he wrote the first one, and he took rather a while to find his feet with the series. By his reckoning, it wasn't until Let it Bleed, the seventh in the series, that he'd served his apprenticeship and started to become more ambitious with what he was trying to do. From the outset though, he'd been able to provide perfectly serviceable plots and genre entertainment. Almost from the beginning, he's pushing the series in a direction which will allow him to give a more comprehensive and political picture of modern Scotland, from the depths to the heights. Rebus is more a collection a traits than a character, as are most successful genre heroes, but the familiarity which comes from spending time with the same character gives him a life (it's the Sherlock Holmes effect). Rankin clearly likes his leading men to be older and disillusioned. I've also read his early spy novel, Watchman, which feature a very similar hero.

No, the problem I had was the quality of the writing. Rankin is a solidly realist writer, which you expect in crime fiction, but there's little of the lyricism or obsession that I've found in the best crime fiction I've read. There's something almost casual about his often workaday prose. He's gotten better by Black and Blue, certainly. The first 50 pages or so feel like a tribute to the manic intensity of James Ellroy, but after that the writing settles down. With a lot of crime fiction I feel it's the opening and the investigation which are the most interesting parts of the book, and here Rankin uses the investigation to give a broad ranging picture of Scotland's oil industry which are some of the most interesting parts of the book. The conclusion to these things always leave something wanting, the destination is never as interesting as the journey. Here the culprit is caught some way before the end of the book, partly in order for Rebus to have a final near miss with Bible John.

The inclusion of this real historical serial killer from Scotland's past is certainly audacious, but ultimately seems to point up the weakness of Rankin's method. It works at first, as we're introduced to him  through the third person narration. We've no idea who this character is which effectively generates the tension over what he's doing in the story and what's going to happen. In a nice bit of misdirection, the one time he actually meets Rebus we don't know who he is either, appearing under a completely different name. Rankin sensibly doesn't have Rebus actually catch him. He almost does, but Bible John ultimately disappears from the narrative just as he did from history. It makes it all too solid and actual though. Rankin doesn't know who Bible John actually was. There are suspects for the real killer, but like Jack the Ripper, his real identity is ultimately lost to history. Compare Rankin's approach to Grant Morrison and Daniel Valley's Bible John: A Forensic Meditation, serialised in Crisis magazine 20 years ago, and it seems wanting. for Morrison, Bible John become a creature of myth, and his narrative widens into an intense and hallucinogenic exploration of the nature of evil. Ultimately Rankin's Bible John is a fantasy of the super smart serial killer, a figure which dominated so much fiction of the 90s (Seven has a lot to answer for) and now feels like a rather sick and unreal character type. Not Rankin's fault if he was writing at the beginning of such a trend I suppose, but when it feels like such an adolescent trend anyway, you wonder why anyone would bother. I could of course be wrong, but I sense he had the idea for including Bible John in his novel without having any clear idea of what to do with him.

I've read 8 of Rankin's Rebus novels now and I'm not sure how many more I'll read. They aren't bad, far from it, but don't ever quite escape the mundanity of their conception. Seeing the obvious riff on James Ellroy in Black and Blue's opening sections, and Ellroy's own endorsement of Rankin's writing, a comparison might be in order. He's less sentimental than Ellroy, but Ellroy is more compelling in his obsession. As the series goes on, the novels become longer (a common occurrence it seems) and it starts to feel as though they aren't worth the effort.

Terry Pratchett, Making Money

A while before I read this, a very dear friend had told me how good it was, and how appropriate it was that it appeared in 2007 just in time for the crisis which engulfed our financial sector. The second of the Discworld novels to feature the lovable conman Moist Von Lipwig, this time he's put in charge of the city of Ankh-Morpork's central bank. Ranged against him are the aristocratic Lipwig family who used to own the bank and are attempting to rest back control. As with any Pratchett novel the enjoyment comes in the variety of comic invention displayed in the plot's ramshackle arrangement of comic episodes, although this isn't perhaps his most successful in that regard. What's most interesting is how it addresses present day concerns, as my friend rightly pointed out. Certainly it was nicely timed in its publication. The idea that money is only a concept and not actually real isn't exactly a new one, but it's certainly got some relevance to our country's current financial state. The Guardian's reviewer claimed that it contains a 'a startlingly savage attack on the greed of privatisation'. I wonder how relevant it really is, though?

More than in the previous Moist book (Going Postal) the main character is a bundle of contradictions, a self-reflective conman who is fully aware of the effect of his actions on others. Outside of the fantasy of the Discworld his contradictions would unravel. At several points when he sees the lower middle class shop keepers who want to invest their money in the bank he has made newly successful, he becomes reflective on both his own lower middle class origins, and also how dependant such people are on powerful figures like himself. In at least one Sam Vimes novel, the now ennobled commander of the City Watch was prone to almost identical reflections. It's the sentimental reflection of the self made man, and the presence of such reflections in two such different characters suggest that it reflects something of Pratchett's own genuine feelings about his own success and distance from his origins. There's always been something rather sentimental at the heart of Pratchett's vision, and as the series has progressed and developed into a series with designs on the real world outside its pages, its hard not to feel that it's also become something of a vehicle for the author's personal expression.

What I find it odd though, is that the villains are explicitly identified as members of the aristocracy, the Lavish family, who are opposed to the jumped up tyrant of the city, Vetinari. That the villains are the aristocracy no doubt goes in hand with the series' original premise to debunk the conventions of fantasy. Kings and princes are not inevitable or needed, we can manage quite well without such privileged characters. Discworld has always been opposed to unearned privilege. Does it attack privatisation then? Well, Vetinari and Moist certainly want to keep it out of the hands of the Lavishs, but the solution seems to be a kind of fantasy equivalent to the 'Big Bang' that convulsed the City of London in 1986. Arguably that financial deregulation is part of what has led to the current economic predicament. That too was seen as an attack on unearned privilege and the old boy's network. The most powerful people of today, the villains who are responsible for the financial crisis aren't aristocrats, they're people very like Moist and Vetinari. And Vetinari is still a tyrant. He still holds all the power in this fantasy city. Put a blonde wig on him and might we not see the face of Margaret Thatcher staring back at us?