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There is a pleasantly unexpected tension to this novella, I realized as I got a few pages into it, which has to do with a slightly confusing publishing history. I did something I never do: I stopped and went to the end, looking for some kind of author's note. Aha! There it was, an Afterword...which, alas, did not quite clear up the confusion. Though published here in June 2000, well after Rankin's stunning full-length novel DEAD SOULS, this novella was written first. When it was published in England and Scotland, I do not know.
Even if Rankin's Afterword had not mentioned it (and if I hadn't peeked), on the strength of internal evidence I would have been willing to wager --- a wager seems appropriate, as much of the novella's plot has to go with gambling --- that this little book came first into the author's mind and hand, before DEAD SOULS. Thus, for a true Rankin fan (and Oh, I am, I am!), DEATH IS NOT THE END is a fabulous opportunity to watch a master craftsman's mind at work; to see how the one short book evoked themes and characters that were too big and too important to be allowed to die at the end of just 73 pages. If the true Rankin fan happens to also write books herself (and I do), it's doubly an honor and a treat to read these pages and learn from them.
Having read DEAD SOULS first does somewhat detract. If you are relatively new to Rankin and have not read either of the two, I'd suggest you start with DEATH IS NOT THE END and then go on to DEAD SOULS, noticing as you do how the echoes call to one another from book to book. As for me, I intend to reread DEAD SOULS immediately, and I'll consider it time well spent.
The theme here is the significance of loss in one's life --- any kind of loss, but particularly the loss of a person --- to death, or to the end of a relationship, or perhaps worst of all, to a simple disappearance without explanation. Inevitably that sense of loss becomes heavier and heavier as one grows older and the losses pile up. Inextricably entwined with loss is memory, for the realization of the one is dependent upon the evocation of the other.
From there, if I may extrapolate, arises the question of psychic pain, pain of the human soul. Always the question hovering around Inspector John Rebus: How much pain and darkness can a human being bear and remain sane? How much can he take and still stand on two feet, do his job, get up in the morning, get through the days? Not to mention the nights, when he often sits in the dark, never going to bed at all. If Rebus could give up his memories, then the pain would be less to bear --- we learn that in this novella, in which for the first time Ian Rankin lets us into Rebus's private life, into his past and the later years of his childhood, when there were times that were almost, almost happy. If one gives up memory to lessen pain, then the good memories will be gone along with the bad. And that's a problem.
A boy goes missing: the boy is the son of Rebus's childhood friend Brian "Barney" Mee, who still lives in the old hometown in County Fife, where Rebus seldom goes (because too many memories live there), and where his policeman's jurisdiction does not extend. But Brian asks for help and John responds. He goes back to the old hometown to find that Mee has married Janice, a girl John could have loved, who might have loved him; now she's a woman who is still, perhaps even more, attractive and attracted. At the same time, Superintendent "Farmer" Watson asks Inspector Rebus for a birthday present: the capture of an old enemy who has escaped one too many times to suit the Farmer.
The two cases rub up against each other, but not so neatly that Rebus can work on them together. There are conflicts. They rub and irritate, as the renewal of old friendships rubs and irritates and makes an itch that finally must be scratched. It's an intense, involving story that you can read easily in an evening --- and a good thing too, because once you've started you won't want to put it down.
After you've finished DEATH IS NOT THE END, go on and read DEAD SOULS, and see how Ian Rankin has taken the themes and characters and ideas that must have haunted him in the tight compression of a novella structure and developed them into one of his very best books. It is no exaggeration, in fact, to say that DEAD SOULS is one of the finest crime novels of our time.
--- Reviewed by Dianne Day
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