The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin, author of Exit Music – my note on this is at https://realini.blogspot.com/2022/06/exit-music-by-ian-rankin-one-of-1000.html along with a few thousand other reviews - 8 out of 10

 

The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin, author of Exit Music – my note on this is at https://realini.blogspot.com/2022/06/exit-music-by-ian-rankin-one-of-1000.html along with a few thousand other reviews

 

8 out of 10

 

Ian Rankin has three books included on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list, two are mentioned above and the third is Black and Blue, maybe a note on that will be forthcoming, sometime soon, Insha’Allah

 

The Hanging Garden is an enticing read, I was thinking that crime novels fulfill one condition set by Aristotle https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/aristotle-in-ninety-minutes-by-paul.html for dramas, which was the need for a climax, a reversal like we have in Oedipus Rex, wherein the king finds he has killed his father

In the Sophocles play, the hero married his mother as well, though he was unaware that the man he was fighting was his parent, and the woman he would have children with him was his own mother https://realini.blogspot.com/2017/03/oedipus-rex-by-sophocles-and-adapted-by.html so with a knife, he takes out his own eyes

 

We might say that there is too much to unpack in The Hanging Garden, I mean the Yakuza – with its upper echelon, called…I forgot what – the Russian Mafia, the Nazis, Rat line and quite a few other malefactors meet in what looks like quite a small place for such a cosmopolitan gathering of the Bad and the Ugly

Detective Inspector John Rebus is at the center of this narrative, he is the hero of the other books in the series, and he has to uncover quite a web of crimes, from drug dealing to proxenetism, from murder to trafficking and more, and in the process, it is not just his own safety that is in danger, but that of his family

 

Spoiler alert – I will probably get some of the details exposed in here, but also, with incredible modesty, I must confess that you may not find these lines all that compelling, so mea culpa – the inspector gets attached to one of the victims in this story, the Bosnian girl forced into prostitution, known as Candice, but her real name is Dunja

She comes from Sarajevo, and would insist that people keep telling her that she is so lucky, she is a survivor of that horrible war, only she is not fortunate at all, on the contrary, she has suffered abuse, her child is kept as a blackmailing instrument, if she does not obey the pimp then the boy will be harmed, even killed

 

Trying to protect her, the detective is thinking of a shelter, and he thinks of his own daughter, who lives with an inquisitive journalist - who will get into trouble because of his curiosity and that makes me think of how wrong these popular sayings, proverbs are, curiosity killed the cat they say, but that is so far out there…

 

Curiosity is actually part of wisdom, on the chart established by Martin Seligman https://realini.blogspot.com/2013/11/flourish-by-martin-seligman-i-ii.html the co-founder of positive psychology, which you may not know it, but it is a quite young offspring of psychology, established around 2,000

Dunja aka Candince is spending some nights with Sammy aka Samantha, the inspector’s daughter, but that attracts the retaliation of the gangsters, and one of their hatchet men is hitting her with a car, in the first place, they think it is an accident, but then a painter witnessing the incident says the driver wanted to hit the woman

 

Dunja stayed with some people in the countryside, and she disappears, a car stopped, with two men inside, and then she drove with them, they did not use force, physical anyway, but they had her child, so she had to give up trying to keep away, later, Rebus meets with her in a toilet, and she is so drugged that she may be gone

When he tries to crash her pills with the soles of his shoes, she just uses the fingers to get the powder off the floor…there are other victims, some of them also monsters, like this Lintz, who is suspected, then proved somehow to have been the officer who had ordered a massacre during World War II, when he was a Nazi

 

Oradour-sur-Glane was the real place, where a mass killing took place, with women, children, disabled and old were killed, Lintz is hiding in Scotland, and he could be just one of a multitude of former Nazis, war criminals, offered protection by the allies after the end of the war, to keep them off the hands of the Soviets…

Some high-profile cases are well known, Wernher von Braun had been working for Hitler during WWII, and then he would become the head of the NASA program, which would eventually lead to the Apollo program, so we could argue over the Categorical imperative precept of Immanuel Kant, or the integrity concept

 

For Immanuel Kant https://realini.blogspot.com/2016/03/kant-in-90-minutes-by-paul-strathern.html we would need to do at any time what is ethical, just as Martin Seligman has included integrity in the courage set of the Character Strengths that he has  listed and you can find online, but let me get back to Lintz

He may be uncovered, as part of the Rat line, the multitude of German officers with new identities, and he is found killed, it is presumed, and we hear the complicated story, the alert was up there, the fellow had expensive tastes, he had orgasms looking at women with their head in a noose, eyes bulging, and he wants to commit suicide, and he pays one of the members of the underworld to help him, for he cannot do it himself…

 

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

 There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

 

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’

 

‚Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus’

 

“From Monty Python - The Meaning of Life...Well, it's nothing very special...Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”