the dark remains [book review]

When I left Birmingham a month ago, I spotted The Dark Remains, a book by Ian Rankin and the late William McIlvanney featuring Laidlaw, a unique Glaswegian detective featuring in his other books. Which I of course bought on the spot. (Ironically, along with the latest Ishiguro!) The book had been started by McIlvanney but left unfinished, which is where Rankin took over, as a big fan of McIlvanney, the designated father of tartan noir. This is a prequel to the other three Laidlaw novels, taking place in the early years of Laidlaw, at a time he was still living with his family, and it starts as a brewing war between two Glasgow gangs, with a fantastic immersion in the Glasgow of the 1970’s. The conclusion of the story is somewhat disappointing but the atmosphere and the reflection on the attitudes of the era are making it a great book. I actually stopped searching for Rankin’s touch almost from the start.

As an aside, the meaning of the title is unclear to me: is the Dark that remains or are the remains dark..? Reading from the Scotsman, it seems this is a typical French miscomprehension!

strange loyalties [book review]

This book by William McIlvarnney is the third and last one in the Laidlaw investigation series and the most original of the three as far as I am concerned… For it is more an inner quest than a crime investigation, as the detective is seeking an explanation to the accidental death of his brother as well as the progressive deterioration of their relation, while trying to make sense of his own life and his relation to women. It is thus as far a crime novel as it is possible, although there are criminals involved. And Laidlaw cannot separate his “job” from his personal life, meaning he does investigate on his free time the death of his brother.  It is entirely written in a first-person perspective, which makes the reading harder and slower in my case. But an apt conclusion to the trilogy, rather than being pulled into finer and finer threads as other detective stories. Brilliant (like the light on Skye during the rain).

“Life was only in the living of it. How you act and what you are and what you do and how you be were the only substance. They didn’t last either. But while you were here, they made what light there was – the wick that threads the candle-grease of time. His light was out but here I felt I could almost smell the smoke still drifting from its snuffing.”

Glasgow [The papers of Tony Veitch]

[I read the second volume of McIlvanney’s Laidlaw Trilogy, The papers of Tony Veitch, with the same glee as the first one. And with some nostalgia at the yearly trips to Glasgow I made over the years, albeit a decade after the book was published. Some passages were too good to be missed!]“Standing so high, Laidlaw felt the bleakness of summer on his face and understood a small truth. Even the climate here offered no favours. Standing at a bus stop, you talked out the side of your mouth, in case your lips got chapped. Maybe that was why the West of Scotland was where people put the head on one another—it was too cold to take your hands out your pockets.”

“A small and great city, his mind answered. A city with its face against the wind. That made it grimace. But did it have to be so hard? Sometimes it felt so hard. Well, that was some wind and it had never stopped blowing. Even when this place was the second city of the British Empire, affluence had never softened it because the wealth of the few had become the poverty of the many. The many had survived, however harshly, and made the spirit of the place theirs. Having survived affluence, they could survive anything. Now that the money was tight, they hardly noticed the difference. If you had it, all you did was spend it. The money had always been tight. Tell us something we don’t know. That was Glasgow. It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground. And what circumstances kept giving it was cruelty. No wonder he loved it. It danced among its own debris. When Glasgow gave up, the world could call it a day.”

“Laidlaw had a happy image of the first man out after the nuclear holocaust being a Glaswegian. He would straighten up and look around. He would dust himself down with that flicking gesture of the hands and, once he had got the strontium off the good suit, he would look up. The palms would be open.   ‘Hey,’ he would say. ‘Gonny gi’es a wee brek here? What was that about? Ye fell oot wi’ us or what? That was a liberty. Just you behave.’     Then he would walk off with that Glaswegian walk, in which the shoulders don’t move separately but the whole torso is carried as one, as stiff as a shield. And he would be muttering to himself, ‘Must be a coupla bottles of something still intact.’”

“They were sitting in the Glasgow University Club bar (…) Laidlaw was staring at his lime-juice and soda. Harkness was taking his lager like anaesthetic. Around them the heavy buildings and empty quadrangles seemed to shut out the city, giving them the feeling of being at the entrance to a shaft sunk into the past. Certainly, the only other two people in the room were having less a conversation than a seance, though they only seemed to summon the dead in order to rekill them.

    The talk of the two university men reminded Laidlaw of why he had left university at the end of his first year, having passed his exams. He found that the forty-year-old man agreed with the nineteen-year-old boy. He suspected that a lot of academics lived inside their own heads so much they began to think it was Mount Sinai. He disliked the way they seemed to him to use literature as an insulation against life rather than an intensification of it.

    He liked books but they were to him a kind of psychic food that should convert to energy for living. With academics the nature of their discipline seemed to preclude that. To take it that seriously would have annihilated the limits of aesthetics. Listening to their exchange of attitudes in what amounted to a private code, he didn’t regret the youthful impulse which had pushed him out into the streets and now brought him back here, by a circuitous and painful route, as an alien visitor. He didn’t want to be included in that clique of mutually supportive opinions that so often passes for culture.

    He remembered what had finally crystallised his rejection of university. It had been having to read and listen to the vague nonsense of academics commenting on the vague nonsense of much of what D. H. Lawrence wrote. Coming himself from a background not dissimilar to Lawrence’s, he thought he saw fairly clearly how Lawrence had put out his eyes with visions rather than grapple with reality that was staring him in the face. You needn’t blame him for hiding but you needn’t spend volumes trying to justify it either; unless, of course, it helped to make your own hiding easier to take.

    ‘A lot of what passes for intellectuality’s just polysyllabic prejudice,’ Laidlaw thought aloud.”