Fleshmarket Close – Ian Rankin

In this, the fifteenth outing of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh based detective, Rebus and protégé Siobhan Clarke have been farmed out to the suburbs having lost their office space at their old St Leonards police station. Rebus feels sidelined, but at least it gives him freedom to operate as he does best – independently and unconventionally.

When a murder crops up in one of the outlying housing projects he is quickly on the scene. The estate has a high proportion of immigrants and asylum seekers, and the victim is one of them.

Meanwhile Clarke is contacted by the parents of a girl whose rape (and subsequent suicide) she had investigated some years ago; now the other daughter has gone missing.

Added to the murder and missing persons are two bodies found buried in a cellar in Fleshmarket Close, just off the Royal Mile. Both Rebus and Clarke attend but there is something fishy about the find as the bodies turn out to be just bones picked clean.

The three cases develop with the expected complexity, interweaving and connecting (or not) and with the expected complications for Rebus’s and Clarke’s personal lives (will a clinch in the previous book translate to more) and professional prospects (Clarke is on the way up, Rebus is treading water).

In these later Rebus books Rankin always injects some topicality and while this dates from 2004 the context of immigration still has resonance today. The issues are handled well enough – exposing prejudice and inhumanity – with Rebus characteristically cutting in his assessment of all those around him, be they do-gooder or bigot. While unable to do much to right all the wrongs he sees, he does what he can, while solving the crimes, to help those in need that cross his path.

Rankin rarely disappoints and this outing is well up to standard, benefitting from being a bit shorter (at 400 pages) and tighter than its immediate predecessors.

Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk – Ben Fountain

Read as leg 3 (Texas, USA) of the Bookpacking reading journey.

Billy Lynn and the rest of Bravo Platoon are nearing the end of their ‘victory tour’, their last engagement at Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, for the Thanksgiving Day game against the Bears.

The ‘engagement’ that got them here was a short, sharp and bloody firefight in Iraq, captured on newsreel footage which, being largely successful from the US viewpoint, has become an internet sensation at home and a totem for the war effort. Their reward is a short furlough back in the US – provided they perform in the media circus and accept their due as heroes of the nation.

Billy Lynn doesn’t feel like a hero, he didn’t exactly volunteer to serve, and the adulation is starting to wear thin.

There is a lot going on at Texas Stadium, a lot for Billy to process. Bravo now have an agent who is trying to cut them a film deal, promising big bucks but so far delivering nothing; their role in the half time show is vague and while it should include meeting the fabulously attractive cheerleaders, Beyoncé led Destiny’s Child will be on stage too; and the Cowboys owner has invited the platoon into his suite for hospitality among the rich and powerful, which takes them all far from their comfort zone.

Billy has two other preoccupations. He had twenty-four hours at home, down the road at Stovall, that reintroduced him to his family’s troubles and during which his sister Kathryn tried to persuade him to dodge his return to war; and now he’s besotted with one of the cheerleaders who to his surprise seems to reciprocate. More immediately he needs a drink and some pills for his headache.

Through the blur in his head the contradictions between his current treatment as a ‘hero’ and his previous as a ‘grunt’, a nobody, lead to half-formed questions about who he is actually fighting for; whose will the victory be? But though war is hell, and victory maybe hollow, could he walk away from his platoon, his comrades, his true loyalty?

The narration places the reader firmly in Billy’s consciousness, making the language authentic and providing a lot of buy-in to his situation and mindset.

Billed as “the Catch 22 of the Iraq war”, this takes a swipe less at the military than the civilian context of the war. There is humour but the out-loud laughs are fewer and the cynicism is more bitter – Billy is only nineteen so his eyes are just opening to the self-serving and exploitation that abounds.

Billy Lynn is a book of its time and one that deserves to be read and enjoyed on its own merits.