Dead Souls

Начало книги

Dead Souls was wholly conceived and written in Edinburgh — the first time this had happened since Rebus’s initial outing in Knots & Crosses. The intervening novels had been written during my four-year stint in London, or else in the further six years spent in rural France. Now I was back in Edinburgh... and worried that I would no longer be able to write about the place. This was a realistic fear, too: I had used geographical distance to help me recreate Edinburgh as a fictionalised city. How would I cope now that I could take a short stroll and see what I’d been getting wrong all those years?

I needn’t have worried.

Dead Souls is named after a song by Joy Division. As its title might suggest, it’s not a number you would dance to at weddings, unless you count the Addams Family among your in-laws. I was aware, of course, of Joy Division’s source material — the unfinished novel Dead Souls by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. The phrase ‘tortured genius’ might have been coined with Gogol in mind. Having published the first half of Dead Souls, he ended up burning the drafts of its second half. Later on, he started work on the book again, until his religious teacher persuaded him to renounce literature altogether. So the latest version of the second half went up in flames again, and Gogol died ten days later.

Читать дальше →