Sunday, October 3, 2010

Exit Music, Clicking of Cuthbert

Exit Music is the last of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels.  Rankin has always paid rigorous attention to passing time, and the last few books have had a real sense of Rebus's impending retirement.  In Exit Music, Rebus wants to finally put Big Ger Cafferty behind bars, after sparring with him for so much of the series.  But, in the event, Cafferty is put into a coma by someone else who hopes to pin it on Rebus.

Rankin spends a fair amount of time on the equivalence (or lack thereof) between Cafferty and Rebus -- the old question of whether hunter and hunted are doubles of each other.  In the end, he shows literally how Rebus can't live without Cafferty, as the novel closes on Rebus giving Cafferty the kiss of life.  The ending is a good one for the series, though I thought the novel as a whole wasn't Rankin's best.  There's a lot of floundering around, and it feels like Cafferty is more of a bit player than he should be.

I'd never read any of Wodehouse's "golf" stories, although I'd heard they're quite funny, since I'm not a golf fan.  Other than knowing that the lowest score wins, I know nothing about golf.  But on of my first purchases for my kindle was a collection of all Wodehouse's public domain works, and The Clicking of Cuthbert is in the set, so I decided to give it a shot.  These stories are really funny!  I still don't know what a niblick is, but I was chortling through most of the book.

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