Alrightreads: Reekies

Is Edinburgh the greatest city in the world? It's my favourite anyway, and has been since I first went to the Fringe at 18 for a formative couple of days. I've seen enough cities since then and the verdict holds up, though those have mainly, admittedly, been at the developing end of the scale. Here are some Edinburgh-based books, because I like to torture myself or something.


Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes

1879 / Ebook / 61 pages / UK

***

I would have liked to have gone to school in Edinburgh. There wasn't much to learn about the South Cheshire village I grew up in, beyond the one 16th-century pub, whose Dick Turpin connection is optimistic at best, so it was nice to learn some of the history of my favourite city beyond the ghoulish side I already knew. Though Stevenson inevitably digs that stuff up too, it's Edinburgh after all.

This brief but intimate tour is dated in a very satisfying way, capturing a time when the New Town was actually new, Dean Village was still a village and Calton Hill was already a national embarrassment.

Ian Rankin, Knots & Crosses

1987 / Audiobook / 168 pages / UK

***

If the postgraduate Rankin had a premonition of how long his John Rebus series was going to last, he probably wouldn't have mined seemingly the whole backstory of the brooding inspector in his first outing. Those subsequent ones are also presumably less directly linked to the detective solving them, or he'd become a liability. And Edinburgh presumably calms down from its sensational spell as Europe's murder capital so readers don't feel increasingly alienated by the alternate reality setting.

I'm not the biggest fan of mudder mysteries, but it was alright. Though totally unsolvable until Rankin decides you can have the essential missing pieces now in that Agatha Christie way.


Iain Banks, Complicity

1993 / Physical book / 313 pages / UK

****

This was the reason behind my Edinburgh-themed reading, really. I picked this up in a used bookshop almost three years ago, and since then it's only served as an occasional mouse mat, eagerly awaiting the next time I'd take a couple of long solo flights and finally have a reason to read printed paper rather than a screen.

It's got the usual violence, rape, bondage and murder that hasn't been shocking for a good few books now, but it's more engaging than most of those were, and maybe my favourite '90s (i.e. second-tier) Banks. It's got to be the author's most indulgent stand-in work too, from the Edinburgh specifics to his appreciation of retro strategy games, whisky and other substances.

Jonathan Aycliffe, The Matrix

1994 / Ebook / 237 pages / UK

****

Don't let the '90s setting, sceptical debunking and drug references fool you; this Edinburgh-set occult horror is a complete throwback, and I appreciated the sincere pastiche. Let others take up the burden of innovation.

The author's done his research to make his doomed scholars and forbidden tomes more plausible than Lovecraft's (or he's just better at making up convincing-sounding names), even if the narrator's obliviousness and abrupt descent from rational sociologist to gibbering acolyte are similarly laughable. That can all be excused by the foreboding creepiness that hangs over much of it, which I've rarely felt outside of childhood horror books.


James Robertson, To Be Continued or, Conversations with a Toad

2016 / Ebook / 336 pages / UK

***

James Robertson has written some acclaimed and very serious-sounding novels about Scotland.  He also wrote this stream-of-consciousness ramble about a man's low-stakes midlife crisis odyssey across Scotland with a talking toad, which naturally struck me as more appealing. Having doggedly stuck with it through to its conclusion, I can certainly say it is one of the books I have read.

Mental essays: Rear Window and the Perinatal Unconscious, or A Womb with a View

"A homo-erotic reading of Rear Window is reluctantly invited by the word ‘rear’ in the title ... the window’s position at the rear of the house may even imply a masculinised cervix" – my actual university essay

We've been working through the Hitchcock films recently, and when it got to that bit in Rear Window where Jeffries falls out of the window, I suddenly remembered that I once wrote a ridiculous essay at university making the case that – beyond the obvious analogies of voyeurism and impotence – the film was also clearly influenced by Hitchcock's repressed, traumatic memories of birth (whether he realised it or not).

I found it.

In fairness to my student self, this was a combination of psychoanalytical piss-taking and being too lazy to research a new theory from scratch. I'd come across Stanislav Grof's LSD research in the library some time before, when researching something different that I can't even remember now, and had been desperate to squeeze any work of fiction into its malleable framework as soon as it came up.

I may not have taken the ENGL307 Literature and Film unit very seriously, especially when they kept letting me get away with this stuff. The sketch show Big Train is cited as a reference, that's the level of academic professionalism we're dealing with.

Alrightreads: Prestige Who

The point of these 1,000-page slots was that I hoped they'd force me to read something a bit substantial each month. It's only March and I'm already on Doctor Who.

My excuse is that this vaguely-defined 'range' of Who books recruited established, proper authors to write something more worthwhile than the usual cash-in merchandise, even if their singular styles were being watered down to fit into the the magical world of a children's programme.

These had better be good, or I'm going to look really silly.


Michael Moorcock, Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles, or Pirates of the Second Aether

2010 / Audiobook / 343 pages / UK

**

After experimental, eccentric is one of my favourite flavours of Who, but it's a tricky tightrope. I enjoyed it when Douglas Adams wrote silly space pirates in the seventies (complete with robot parrot and LEGO® Technic eyepatch), but Moorcock's takes on anachronistic buccaneers and Wodehousian toffs come off like weak homages and don't give me much of an idea of what his own style might be like. I don't imagine many young readers made it through too many chapters, I would have called it a day too if it hadn't been in low-effort audiobook form.

This was written with the then-current stars Matt Smith & Karen Gillan in mind, but if the author didn't repeatedly perv over Amy Pond's beauty every time she stepped onto the page, you wouldn't know which iteration of the stock characters he was doing. When he even remembers that they're there.

Stephen Baxter, Doctor Who: The Wheel of Ice

2012 / E-book / 311 pages / UK

***

Black-and-white Doctor Who collides with contemporaneous hard sci-fi in the Arthur C. Clarke mould, written by Clarke's frequent latter-day "collaborator" (i.e. the one who actually wrote Time Odyssey).

Baxter endeavours to tell a typically grandiose future tech tale in the style of a cheap sixties TV serial. These desires are fundamentally incompatible, but when the characters aren't explaining advanced sci-fi concepts or gazing at high-budget marvels of engineering, it's easy to imagine the cramped sets and guest cast putting on fake American accents to sound futuristic. It's a false-nostalgic treat, while the glow lasts.

Unfortunately, this authenticity extends to it being padded out with as much superfluous fluff as the old six-part serials. Was lumping future genius Zoe with babysitting duties while the men solve the sciencey problem some ironic period sexism too?

Alastair Reynolds, Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

2013 / Audiobook / 368 pages / UK

****

The very best Who stories are format-breaking. This isn't one of those, as Reynolds rebuilds the structure of the highly distinctive early-70s iteration of the series to an impeccable tee, basically giving us the best Pertwee serial never made. If you're a fan of the UNIT ensemble era, this is as good as Who lit gets. If you're an Alistair Reynolds fan, you'll presumably find it a bit confounding and embarrassing.

My only issue is that it's a bit hard to take seriously with that phallic spaceship cover and enemies called Sild.

A. L. Kennedy, Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse

2015 / Audiobook / 368 pages / UK

***

It's foolish to get your hopes up when tie-in merchandise is set in the period of a series that happens to be your favourite, especially when it's a pastiche 40 years down the line.

Kennedy's Tom Baker horror story is as heartfelt and informed as her predecessors' were, her Tom Baker's spot-on, and she's got a nice turn of phrase like Adams and Moffat that keeps this story of a psychic monster lurking under a golf course appropriately light-hearted. It just comes off feeling more like one of those later Williams-era Gothic revivals than a classic from the Hinchcliffe years.

I almost lasted four books before my reviews descended to incomprehensible jargon, could have been worse.