Scotland: Ian Rankin

I finished Rankin's Fleshmarket Close. I started it a year back, and then stopped it. At some point, I didn't find the story interesting to pursue reading; I think it's because of the volume of the book. It's almost 500 pages, and I wondered everytime I picked the book to continue reading, what possible new plot twist is going to be revealed to keep me going on for 500 pages.

This time however, I wanted to learn more about countries, as I mention in my previous post, and that was what shileded my sight away from the volume of the book.

The story of course maintains the big revelations to the end of the book, and sadly enough it has some little bit of action going on towards the last pages. It is sad to me because it is such a cliche, and it felt like it had to be there, as a sort of a requirement to crime novels.
The plot of modern crime fiction, even of televised crime series, suffer from a lot of politics that almost dictate how the characters are to act. This is probably due to the reason that a lot of this fiction actually borders on the non-fiction. There is almost an obsessive attempt to make the story look as real as possible, which is why oftentimes the book looks more like a movie being read than a true fiction. This unfortunately makes the character present in the movie, because they have a job to do, rather than the other way around, in which you see the job obtruding on the lives of the characters. This is perhaps a characteristic of the modern man, and is, as a consequence, reasonably justified in a modern novel. To me however, it felt short from grabing my attention.

The charatcers are loosely drawn, and I question how a female author would portray Siobhan; often I confused her with a man carrying a woman's name. Perhaps as well, this is a characteristic of modern story-telling, and if the reader of this blog is attracted towards such modernity he or she might find the book pleasurable to read.
The writing style is better than what I've read in commercial novels, aside Harry Potter perhaps. It's been quite some time since I stopped being impressed by modern English writing. It's because I find the English language too vulgarized and stripped of its essence by its commercial uses. I find lots of words are freely used in the mass media, around the office, in movies and songs, that stumbling upon them in books makes me imaginarily urge the author for different vocabulary.
It should be noted however, that my judgement is based upon my preference for the classical construction of the novel, the nineteenth century's construction of the sentence, as well as a fictional portrait of characters and events. It is why I prefer Sherlock Holmes to Rankin's Rebus.

I did like some aspsects of the book, and if success is measured by such books as the propensity to buy another book from the same author, then yes, I believe this book to be successful.
In some scenes one identifies with Rebus, but this is because the book is not far from daily life. The light humor that I enjoy in British literature is undoubtedly present. I admired as well some of the juxtaposition between the old and the new in Scotland that extends from bricks to attitudes.

I am currently finishing A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. I am much more pleased by this book, which I started reading as I was still reading Fleshmarket Close, once there was not much more to discover. I will write my impressions of that book once it is finished.

Crime Novels From The World, 1- Henning Mankell, Sweden

I love to read. But I develop an addiction for a single author, and can easily spend a year reading no other book than by him/her. So this year, I'm going to chose a genre addiction, and the choice fell on crime novels.

I chose crime novels, because they're portable. Their reading can be taken to Starbucks, to Second Cup, to a parking/restaurant/theater/ waiting for an unbelievable tardy companion. I also love to learn more about cultures, since I've never traveled outside Lebanon, and yes, countless other "serious" authors probe their societies, or their childhood memories in search for an explanation, an understanding or an elucidation of some social norm, I find crime authors, when they themselves are "serious" to bring a more objective look on society, with a wider scope of people and places, albeit at the detriment of a less detailed social and psychological study.

This is one of the rare times in which I know what I actually want to do, or, what I actually want from reading.

Proceeding with the blog's title, I got a book of Mankell, Les Chiens de Riga (The Dogs of Riga), as a Christmas gift. Even though I asked for it, having finished the book, I regretted my choice.

The reason for this, is that the book feels like a journal, more than a novel. It is a very detailed account of what Mankell's Inspector Wallander does every minute of the day. It's like an omni-present camera.
The character is modern, which means single looking for something in life, a meaning or a purpose, with a complicated relationship with his father.

The book is long, long as in unecessarily long; to me a crime novel, if it exceeds 200 pages, is just fishing for boring details and cliched plot twists. This is exactly what the novel degrades too after the essential plot givens are established.

Even though I just finished this book 2 weeks ago, I can't remember much of the details, and I didn't retain much that interested me, except for the writing style, which could have been mirrored in the characters as well. I felt the writing to be in blocks, with no smooth transitions between Wallander's inner thoughts and his present surroundings. Even though I'm used to this technique, I find it in Mankell to be too mechanic, and, consequently, I found the characters to be mechanic as well. I'm not sure if that is a representation of Swedish writing, or of Mankell's, but it is this particularly strange writing technique that might push me to get another book by him; definitely another book by a Swedish author, if I can spot one here.

I have now re-started Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Close. I will post my thoughts once I finish it.