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.