Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian RankinWell, maybe if I say "fuck" a lot in this review Amazon won't seize it and lead it to an evil digital dungeon. ....wait, I say "fuck" all the time anyway.
A very enjoyable way to kill an afternoon. Not a good entry point for anyone not familiar with the series, but hell, it's the eighteenth book. For the rest of us, it's a nice installment.
Rankin, never very good with female characters, serves us up a weepy stalker in this one. I was hoping Rebus would drown her in a bucket of her own tears, but I hoped in vain. The book earns a major DING and DING again from me for making Siobhan and a high-ranking female colleague have a bad case of the Stupids, i.e. they're Not Rebus. (This is why people call me a bitch feminist.) (Then again, to be fair to Rankin, everyone in a series like this is Stupid because they're Not Rebus, so.) Major bonus points for Rebus just being Rebus. The murder and indeed the motive are really glossed over, and the romanticization of the Scottish Thugs 4 Lyf continues, but it's awesome to see Rebus just being Rebus again, which is sometimes all you want in a series.
Some dude named Fox whom I also wanted to drown in a bucket apparently visits from a less successful series Rankin is trying to launch, but fortunately only for four-five chapters total. Remember the Bond movie where Judi Dench dressed down -- which one was it then, Timothy Dalton? -- at the beginning and then he went on Bonding his way all over the movie anyway? It's like that. Fox is foiled, of course, not just by being a berk but by Not Being Rebus. The supposed theme of the book is dinosaurs of the past dying off and a newer generation moving up and moving on, except, well, Rebus. He half-heartedly cuts back on Silk Cuts and trades his IPA for Irn-Bru, but his poor physical shape is emphasized throughout the novel, his heart banging alarmingly at times. It doesn't matter, though: the most unkillable character in modern literature, after the immortal vampire, is the murder dick. I think when Christie died, at the end of his series Poirot was something like eighty-five and yet still looked forty. Twitter and cell phone snaps enter the picture, but what solves it is good old-fashioned flatfoot footwork by Rebus, because, well, what else are you reading the series for?*
The musical selection is, as always, pretty great and the title mondegreen is woven in very well. If the publishers could wrest rights away from the music industry to include a CD or soundtrack link in each book they'd make a mint. (I seem to remember Rankin had a book playlist on last.fm a while ago? but I doubt it still works.) I predict this book will be amazing to American readers because Rebus damnear puts a girdle round Scotland in forty minutes, and here that wouldn't get you halfway through Montana. Rebus' enduring, dangerous, manipulative-on-both-sides relationship with Cafferty is very good. It'd be great to see another book where they really clash.
Nobody would call Rankin a great writer (well, I wouldn't take them seriously if they did) but certain images are haunting: the rained-on full grave at the beginning, a pale hand barely visible at night reaching out of a shallow grave deep in a forest, ghosts of missing and dead girls haunting CCTV footage and cell phones....Despite the indefatigable nature of Rebus, whatever immortality he has depends on his fictional status: his unreality. Whereas for the rest of us, whatever's making us stand in or just above the open grave, death sooner or later shoves us all down into it. And that's not even a crime.
*Colin Dexter cemented his curmudgeonly status once and for all by killing off Morse, which I applaud intellectually but I've only been able to read that book and see that series (in which John Thaw was phenomenal) just the once.
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