Despite the presence of the annual Book Festival, Edinburgh's literary reputation since the early Sixties has been eclipsed by the writing sons and daughters of the west. The fluid and lyrical speech rhythms of James Kelman, the convoluted fictions of Alasdair Grey and the incisive circumlocutions of A.L. Kennedy have, as the city motto nearly has it, made the Word Flourish in Glasgow.
The demons that infuse Irvine Welsh's novels inhabit the docklands of Leith, which, as any resident of Edinburgh will tell you, is another country.
By sluth and stealth these perceptions are being altered by a man from "The Kingdom of Fife", Scotland's elder region, and its chilliest. Since Fifor John Rebus moved into the Oxford Bar, Young Street, Edinburgh, in 1987 (called then, for safe anonymity, The Sutherland Bar in Knots and Crosses), a perspective has shifted. R.L. Stevenson's "precipitous city" has found its own agent-provocateur.
Rebus is the creation of Ian Rankin, also born in Cardenden, Fife, in 1960. His PhD at Edinburgh University was on Muriel Spark. Rebus, who admits to being 50, is a policeman with uneasy principles, dreadful taste in music and several other things - like the aforementioned Oxford Bar - in common with his creator.
The Hanging Garden is the ninth book to feature Rebus (according to the dictionary it means "an enigma"). He has become the articulate voice of the Scottish outsider, a remarkable and quotable commentator in these post-referendum days when an independent province once again wants the autonomy of nationhood. Literary mores, and lazy classifications, closet these books in the "Crime" shelves. So might one describe Jekyll and Hyde as "Science Fiction".
All Rankin's writing excavates the mystery of religious, regional and allied sporting allegiances; of bias, prejudice and bigotry. He does it with a deft skill that often disguises the serious intent, the universal nature, of his questioning.
Though now an inspector, Rebus is still as vulnerable to social slights as only the obsessively lonely can be. His bureaucratic superiors have sidelined him to investigate an alleged second World War criminal. Almost by accident both of them become involved with the victim of a contemporary tragedy.
Teenager Candice is trapped into prostitution in her flight from Bosnia to Britain. Rebus's personal life gains anguished focus when his 20-year-old daughter, Samantha, is critically injured in a hit-and-run incident. Revenge by drug barons he "helped put away" is suspected. The always short-fused father contemplates getting even.
The conscience of the damned becomes subject to forensic surgery. The action shifts from central Edinburgh to a prison cell in Glasgow, then to the economically frozen oil fields of Aberdeen. The geographical meanderings of the plot mirror the ragged fluctuations of Rebus's emotions. This is the heart and soul of this powerful novel.
That a book of this calibre, at this significant period in a disintegrating Britain, might be ignored through genre distinctions would be a disgrace. That Rankin, who moves dialogue with the precision of a chess-master, might be overlooked by literary critics due to the cop-shop situations in his novels, would be negative discrimination.
The Hanging Garden of the title refers to a derelict, overcrowded cemetery in suburban Edinburgh. On one side of it is a run-down council estate. The polluted river Leith slugs along another side. On the other perimeter is an area known as Goldenacre. Rankin introduces this scenario with a quote from Arthur Freed, American film-producer of the farcical Brigadoon: "I went to Scotland and found nothing there that looks like Scotland".
Hayden Murphy is a poet and critic living in Edinburgh
