I always feel a bit bereft when I get to the end of a good story. You feel you've gotten to know the characters, and it's like someone has left you forever. This feeling is compounded today, as I have finished what is reported to be the last in a series of books I've read all of over the past few years. I met John Rebus when my best friends sent me all the available paperbacks in the series at that point for my birthday a few years back. Once again, they prove they know me well.Living in a foreign country sometimes means your sense of cultural self is diluted in the process of making yourself understood to the people around you. Possibly especially when you come from Fife!! Ian Rankin was born just up the road from where I was born, and only a few years before me. His main character, like him, was born in Cardenden, a town where I briefly ran a Highland Dress hire shop before I headed out to Japan. I spent my university days in Edinburgh, the scene of his crimes, studying Goethe and his peers in the original. I don't know if Ian Rankin will ever be spoken of with hindsight in the same terms as they are now . Mystery writing I fear will always suffer the same fate as Comedy at the Oscars - somehow the lower class cousin, not fit to be talked about in the same conversation- although I believe it takes a special kind of genius to do both well. I do think that particularly the later installments in the Rebus series are extremely well written, but the reason that these books speak to me is more personal.
From the very first one, these books took me home for a while. I might be wandering round temples and shrines in crimson Autumn foliage, eating freshly steamed rice with chopsticks, sleeping on grassy smelling tatami mats, and standing in front of sailor suited raven haired girls in reality, but when I picked up one of these books, I was back in Auld Reekie, among my ain folk.
I know the people Rankin describes. People like Begbie in Trainspotting are realistic to me, they were around, but I actually can put names to people in my childhood who are like the people in the Rebus books. Never mind having walked (and staggered some of) the streets he names. Not just the main characters of the plot, but the incidental people who decorate the narrative. He quite literally speaks to me in my own language, and as a Scot and a Fifer, you find yourself laughing out loud at the dry humorous insults that abound, knowing that only we Scots could know that it is in fact funny.
Rebus sees his ghosts, and thinks of the what ifs throughout the novels. They make me see mine too. Not the least of whom is my father. He had a dry oneliner for every occasion, as well as a penchant for meeting "men about dogs" in sometimes less than salubrious drinking establishments (!). His life as a musician let him see Rankin's "underworld" as his "day job" as a engineer let him see the "overworld" too. He didn't feel the need to share his every emotion with the world, preferring to deflect anything too serious with irony, a "smairt" comment and a wry smirk. I imagine his reaction to the smoking ban in Scotland would have been expressed concisely with two fingers.
Not Rebus personified, by any means, but a particular kind of unpretentious Scotsman, of the last generation, who is definitely brought back to life for me by the little remarks and idiosyncracies of all the "old timers" Rebus meets on his travels. The love of music which illustrates the books, though a different genre to my Dad's, adds to the feel. There's a phrase in Scotland "Aye, ah kent yer faither" (I knew your father), which means more than that, but is hard to explain. It has something to do with community. I get a feeling Rankin really does know mine. I feel like I'm back in that community reading the books. Rebus is younger than my Dad would have been, but more important than how my Dad actually was, is that Rankin probably saw men like him from the same generational perspective as I saw my Dad.
My Mum sent me the last book "Exit Music" for my birthday. Although Rebus has been getting older at a fast pace, and it should have been obvious even from the last installment, my life has not allowed for much reading time lately, so I was shocked and apprehensive when I saw the title. In case you're going to read it, I'll give away no more. Suffice it to say though, that I flicked the few blank pages at the end of the book over in denial. Is that really it?
Common sense says "oh please! It's just a novel", and maybe I'm getting a bit dramatic, maybe it's hormones, no wine tonight honest! But I do feel bereft, like a window on my homeland has been closed, if only coz it reminds me that I miss my Dad too.....
I hope Ian comes up with something to cheer me up soon. Maybe a wee story about a girl with a dodgy perm who used to work in a kilt shop.......no, not that interesting....
Anyway, if you think Scotland's all castles, whisky, mountains and sheep, read some of the Rebus books. You might find out what we really do with our castles, whisky and sheep!
