Dead Souls (56 page)

If Rebus has a problem with notions of ‘pecking order’ and the idea of authority generally, what does it say about him that he chose careers in hierarchical institutions such as the Army and then the police?

How does Rebus relate to women: as lovers, flirtations, family members and colleagues?

Do the flashes of gallows humour as often shown by the pathologists but sometimes also in Rebus’s own comments increase or dissipate narrative tension? Does Rebus use black comedy for the same reasons the pathologists do?

Do Rebus’s personal vulnerabilities make him understanding of the frailties of others?

How does the characterisation of Rebus compare to other long-standing popular detectives from British authors such as Holmes, Poirot, Morse or Dalgleish? And are there more similarities or differences between them?

DEAD SOULS

A colleague falls to his death from Salisbury Crags in what is believed to be a flamboyant act of atonement, while animals are being poisoned in the zoo, leading to an operation where Rebus’s actions cause a watery dip for suspicious-looking cameraman Darren Rough. Rebus is going through a ‘bad patch’, wondering where his vocation for police work has gone or even if he wants to be a cop any more, unable to forget the death three months earlier of friend Jack Morton or that daughter Sammy is confined these days to a wheelchair. And Rebus finds that some very personal memories emerge when old schoolmates Barney Mee and wife Janice (the only girl who’s ever knocked Rebus unconscious) call in a personal favour when son Damon vanishes mysteriously from Guitano’s nightclub. The straw that almost breaks the camel’s back is when Cary Oakes, convicted of two murders, is sent home to Edinburgh from the US after a legal technicality sees him released. On his arrival Oakes seems to be working to a very peculiar agenda, a game that Rebus soon realises has myriad unknown rules and one in which Oakes believes him to be his chief adversary.

Against a background featuring a variety of ex-offenders, sex offenders, grim children’s homes and various vulnerable souls, wild parties are held on the Clipper Night Ship for the wasted privileged of
Edinburgh, and it seems that only Rebus will be able to get to the bottom of a murder that has remained a mystery for the past seventeen years.

It’s only six months until the Farmer retires. The one thing he wants? Six
quiet
months …

As Rebus tussles with complex moral issues and an intricate puzzle of a plot in
Dead Souls
, Ian Rankin offers the reader perhaps the most humane analysis yet of his flawed hero.

Discussion points for
Dead Souls

The musical commentary is very obvious in the narrative of
Dead Souls
. Discuss its subtext.

Unexpected connections abound between the characters – between the criminals themselves, and also between Rebus and old friends, or Rebus and ‘ghosts’ from the past – how does Ian Rankin keep them all to the forefront of the reader’s mind?

Is it fair to say that with the retirement of the Farmer, Rebus will lose a valiant comic opponent?

Consider the manner in which Ian Rankin builds the menace surrounding Cary Oakes. Is the role of journalist Jim Stevens integral to this? What is one supposed to make of Oakes’s behaviour in the Catholic church he visits? Why does he make his baiting of Rebus so ‘personal’?