Saturday 18 April 2009

Rebus's Scotland by Ian Rankin

I think I have this on audio CD but the book is even better. Rankin speaks about his own history, from his early life in Cardenden and Bowhill, mining towns in the Kingdom of Fife in Scotland, and how it intersects with Rebus' own history. Rankin speaks about Rebus' attitudes to Scottish society and introduces the darker side of Edinburgh and Scotland witnessed by Rebus through the crimes he deals with. The whole is hauntingly illustrated by the photographers who took the stark black and white pictures that illustrate Rankin's books, pictures of convenience stores, abandoned shipyards, tenments and tower blocks, the less picturesque but no less real unseen Scotland a world away from shortbread tins.

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