Source: www.speakup.com.br
Language level: Advanced
Speaker: Mark Worden
Standard: British accent
Ian Rankin published his first novel in 1986, but success arrived when He published his second novel the following year. It was called Knots and Crosses and it introduced a new character in fiction: Inspector Rebus, a hardened detective who attempts to solve crimes in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. Rankin went on to publish a further 16 Rebus novels, but decided to stop in 2007, when the detective reached the age of 60 and retired.
The Rebus books have been adapted for television and they have been translated into at least 25 languages. They are said to account for 10 per cent of crime fiction sales in Britain.
Not surprisingly, Rankin and Rebus have created something of a tourism industry in Edinburgh. There are Rebus walking tours and you can even download a free iPhone app called “Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh.”
THE DARK SIDE
Yet Rankin, who moved to Edinburgh when he went to university, isn’t the city’s only famous writer, Robert Louis Stervenson, the creator of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was from here, as was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Homes. More recent examples include Muriel spark and Irvine Welsh, author of the cult novel Trainspotting. Their books have a dark side and we asked Ian Rankin whether the same could be said of Edinburgh:
Ian Rankin
(Scottish accent)
There are two towns, there’s the Old Town, which runs from the Castle to the Palace of Holyrood, where the Queen stays when she’s in Edinburgh, and that was the original city, but then, in the 18th century, when it became vermin ridden and insanitary, those who could afford to move started building a “New Town” and there was a physical barrier between the two, there was a lake, a loch, which is now Princess Street Gardens. So there was a physical barrier between two towns, the New Town and the Old Town, and the New Town was a place where rationalism grew up, it’s a place where your scientists and your economists would sit and debate how the world was going to be. And that’s where Robert Louis Stevenson lived when he was a child, his father, his whole family were engineers, they were rationalists, but he was attracted to the chaos that existed in the Old Town.
LOW LIFE
So, as a young man, he would tiptoe out of the house at dead of night and walk up the hill, and go to the taverns where poets and vagabonds and drug addicts and alcoholics and prostitutes would hang out, and so he was seeing those two sides, the rational and the chaotic, the Jekyll and the Hyde. So the city actually, structurally has that, it has that divide.
And when you arrive in Edinburgh, you arrive in hat seems a very civilised city, you arrive at Waverley Station, by rail, which is named after a novel. As you step out, the first thing you see is the huge statue to Sir Walter Scott, the novelist, the biggest statue to a writer in the world, we believe, certainly in Europe. So very imposing and very cultured, but if you go outside the periphery, when you get to the territory that Irvine Welsh writes about in Trainsportting you see there’s another side to Edinburgh, that’s just below the surface.
INSPIRATION
We then asked him why Edinburgh was such a productive place for writers.
Ian Rankin
I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t always like that. I mean, there’s big gaps in its history. I mean, you had Sir Doyle, arguably, although he left and never wrote about the place. You had Stevenson, who you know, didn’t set his most famous book there, Jekyll and Hyde is set, in London, it’s not set in Edinburg, but not many. Then you get to the modern age, there seems to be a gap until you get to Muriel spark, with Miss Brodie, although the vast majority of her books were set abroad, many in Italy because she lived in Italy for many years. And then you come to Irvine Welsh and you get this explosion of people writing about Edinburgh, in the vernacular, and also writing about contemporary Edinburgh, and not the city of the past.
NEIGBOURS
But now Edinburgh contains multitudes of writers, it has changed since…when I arrived as a student in 1978 I couldn’t find anybody who was writing novels about contemporary Edinburgh, there just didn’t seem to be any. There were a few historical novelists, Dorothy Dunnett being the leading example, but nobody writing about contemporary Edinburgh and now, since Trainspotting, there are dozens of authors.
I mean, in my street, I’m not the only novelist in my street: you know, there’s Alexander McCall Smith lives two houses up the road from me, J.K Rowling lives just round the corner, Kate Atkinson is a little bit further on, there’s Lin Anderson, the crime writer, nearby, there’s lots and lots of crime writers in Edinburgh, as well as literary novelists.
MANY FACES
And he had more to say on the subject.
Ian Rankin
And what marks us out in the range of styles, there’s no Edinburgh school, there’s no one type of writing about Edinburgh. So Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh is very different from Rebus’ Edinburgh, which is different from Kate Atkinson’s Edinburgh, which is different from Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh. And it’s as though this small city, this tiny city, half a million people if that, maybe 400.000 people, which can’t grow, it really can’t grow, it’s got the sea to the north, sea to the east, hills to the south, it’s very tightly packed in, it just seems to be fascinating and complex to us.
And I began writing about Edinburgh when I arrived there as a student, to try and make sense of the place, to try and take apart the mechanism, almost as though you’re taking apart an engine, or a watch, or something, and to see what makes it work, what makes it the particular city that it is and that process is ongoing. If I had come to any reasonable conclusions about Edinburgh, I could have stopped writing the books, but I continue to write about Edinburgh because it continues to fascinate me and I still don’t know what makes it tick.
Liked this blog? Please spread it for friends on Social Networkings' bottom sites below
