The Hanging Garden (47 page)

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?

Rebus has been on the wagon, but he falls off when daughter Sammy, now 24, is the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Rebus berates himself for getting distracted at a last dinner with Sammy by thoughts of Joseph Linzstek, who was an SS officer responsible for the deaths of more than seven hundred people in the French village of Villefranche d’Albarede in 1942, and who may have been living quietly in Edinburgh for the last forty years, calling himself Josef Lintz.

But Rebus
is
able to prevent a suicide attempt by Candice, a Sarajevo Muslim refugee who is now being forced to work as a prostitute. Meanwhile, DC Siobhan Clarke has recently been posted to the Scottish Crime Squad to keep twenty-four-hour tabs on Tommy Telford, who appears intent on moving in on Big Ger Cafferty’s pitch now he’s back behind bars in Barlinnie prison, and seems about to invest in the Poyntinghame Golf and Country Club. And where does the dodgy suicide of Mr Taystee fit in? As Rebus muses, ‘
This case was like that: one minute you could see it, the next you couldn’t. Like smoke
.’ And now it seems as if somebody
deliberately
drove at Sammy, whom Rebus had been using in a case of his, and as thoughts of powerlessness threaten to engulf him, there’s nothing that Rebus can do to save the life of another person very dear to him.

Rebus is very vulnerable during
The Hanging Garden
, an extraordinarily emotional book full of reflections on different types of guilt.

Regarding the time frame in
The Hanging Garden
, the most ambitious novel in the Rebus series so far, what is the effect of his reminiscences on the time when Sammy was a child? Does the reader link them emotionally to the memories of the only female survivor of the village massacre?

What are Rebus’s thoughts on the politics behind the German officers who were apprehended by the Allies being returned to Germany in the 1950s to live ordinary lives?

There are several sorts of ‘war’ in
The Hanging Garden
– discuss how they differ from one another, and what the similarities are.

‘
Most of the gangsters Rebus had known, they’d had a worn look, undernourished but overfed. Telford had the look of some new strain of bacteria, not yet tested or understood
.’ How does the reader respond to such a comment?

Why had Rebus been so absent in his marriage, and in Sammy’s upbringing?

Could it be claimed that Rebus is so drawn to Candice because she makes him feel useful (as well as the fact that looks-wise she reminds him of Sammy), while Sammy remains resolutely independent in her dealings with her father? Is Rebus exploiting Candice as much as other people are, only in a different way?

‘
Each investigation is an act of remembrance, and remembrance is never wasted. Remembrance is the only way we learn
.’ Would Rebus agree with this statement from David Levy, who is assisting the Holocaust Investigation Bureau?

Why doesn’t Rebus like Ned Farlowe?

Rebus has had a period of sobriety: does this help him to understand how easy it might be for a man to construct another life for himself?