Book Review

By Derryll White

Rankin, Ian (1990). Hide & Seek.

“The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.”

Ian Rankin writes out of Edinburgh, Scotland and his novels are set there. He was immensely popular 15 years ago, and I still sell his new releases at Lotus Books. For whatever reason, I never got around to reading Rankin until last year when I read ‘Knots & Crosses,’ his first Inspector John Rebus novel – and liked it very much. ‘Hide & Seek’ is the second in the Rebus series. I like to read a series in order, watching the characters grow and develop as the writer creates more and more background.

Rankin’s Edinburgh is dark and foreboding. Sleazy squats occupied by drug culture derelicts fight for space alongside new condo developments. Witch covens play in the woods and homosexual assignations take place inside a dog-fighting pit – all part of Rankin’s background noise.

“Pilmuir, Hiroshima of the soul; he couldn’t escape quickly enough.” But it is a time of change and London money is running north, investing and building parts of Edinburgh anew and bringing some of the privileged sleaze with it.

There are distinct views of class in ‘Hide & Seek.’ The privileged wealthy and merchant princes stand in stark contrast to the disenfranchised inhabiting the squats and the poor working class in the downtrodden neighbourhoods. Exploitation is at the core of this new change. Somehow Rankin makes this much clearer than the same reality existing in Canada.

Then finally, at the end of the novel, ‘Hyde Club’ – the dark side of the human soul where men with too much money and no morals openly exploited those with nothing to lose. And in the end, Ian Rankin uses ‘Hide & Seek’ to reveal a sense of privilege and sickening power that most of us don’t even think of. This is an interesting and disturbing novel which makes me want to read more of the Inspector Rebus series.

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Excerpts from the novel:

HOME – It was Tony McCall’s backyard. All right, so he had moved out of Pilmuir, had eventually bought a crippling mortgage which some people called a house. It was a nice house, too. He knew this because his wife told him it was. Told him continually. She couldn’t understand why he spent so little time there. After all, as she told him, it was his home too.

MASONS – …Rebus shook another firm Masonic hand. He didn’t need to know the secret pressure spots to be able to place a freemason. The grip itself told you everything, lasting as it did a little longer than normal, the extra time it took the shaker to work out whether you were of the brotherhood or not.

GREED – “Bread,” the nervous young man said, carrying another bound file of newspapers over to the counter where Holmes stood. “That’s what worries me. Everybody’s turning into a breadhead. You know, nothing matters to them except getting more than anyone else. Guys I went to school with, knew by the age of fourteen that they wanted to be bankers or accountants or economists. Lives were over before they’d begun”

PRESERVATION – Think like Tarzan, his father had told him once: one of the old man’s few pieces of advice. He was talking about fights. About one-to-one scrapes with the lads at school. Four o’clock behind the bike shed, and all that. Think like Tarzan. You’re strong, king of the jungle, and above all else you’re going to protect your nuts. And the old boy raised a bent knee towards young John’s crotch….

FAMILY – A brother was a terrible thing. He was a lifelong competitor, yet you couldn’t hate him without hating yourself.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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