Ian Rankin named 1966 crime ebook was considered one of his favourites of all time | Books | Entertainment | EUROtoday

When Ian Rankin picks a ebook, it’s by no means random. The bestselling writer of the Rebus novels has spent many years exploring the darker corners of human nature, typically by means of flawed detectives and haunted streets.

But his selection for BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read isn’t your commonplace crime novel. It’s The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger – the screenwriting half of Powell and Pressburger, the filmmaking duo behind British cinema classics like The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death.

The story follows Karl Braun, a seemingly atypical German piano tuner dwelling in Nineteen Sixties London, who is definitely Dr. Otto Reitmüller, a Nazi battle felony hiding in plain sight.

Karl lives amongst different German émigrés, who mistake him for a fellow refugee fleeing Hitler, whereas he navigates a lifetime of paranoia and self-imposed exile, haunted by the previous and fearing the online of justice closing in. And Rankin can’t cease speaking about how unsettlingly good it’s.

“It’s enormously morally complex, this novel, because what we learn very early on is that he is wanted as a Nazi war criminal. And we gradually understand what he did. And it is totally peculiar because I don’t know that we like him or root for him exactly, but we are concerned about what happens to this guy”, Rankin says.

“I think it just fizzes along,” he says, not with the standard pleasure of a page-turner, however with a type of grim fascination. “And if he’s a hunted man, you’re on his side. Somehow you are kind of on his side and the paranoia starts to get to him. He starts to see people around every corner who are out to get him”.

And here’s where more about the book’s context gets complicated: Pressburger was a Hungarian Jew whose own mother died in the Holocaust. That he would write a novel this empathetic towards a Nazi fugitive is, in Rankin’s words, “quite astonishing.”

“To have this quantity of empathy for a hunted Nazi is sort of astonishing, is not it? Yeah, I believe I’ve subsequently learn that he used numerous his personal biographical background particulars with the primary protagonist’s type of character and among the backstory. And there was a type of debate of how might he try this?”

There’s an eerie, near-uncomfortable intelligence to the way in which The Glass Pearls manipulates reader loyalty. Rankin compares it to Patricia Highsmith or Georges Simenon – novelists expert at crafting morally ambiguous thrillers. But right here, “tt’s very morally complex,” he notes. “The whole Hannah Arendt thing about the banality of evil is kind of threaded through this book.”

And then there’s Helen – Braun’s girlfriend, unaware of who she’s actually relationship. Rankin sees her not simply as a compelling character (“she just jumps off the page”), however because the ebook’s quiet ethical core. She’s the conscience Pressburger crops on the centre of his story, permitting readers to really feel the total weight of deception, each private and historic. “Everything [Braun] tells her is fiction,” Rankin notes. “So he’s an amazing storyteller. He’s an amazing maker-up of stuff. And she falls for it.”

Elsewhere within the episode, Colin MacIntyre selected Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement, a lyrical, fragmentary account of artist Suzanne Mallouk’s turbulent relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the course of the explosive artwork scene of early Nineteen Eighties New York: “He’s horrible to Suzanne,” Rankin says bluntly.

And presenter Harriett Gilbert beneficial The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi, a harrowing, intimate portrait of an Afghan girl chatting with her comatose husband as battle rages outdoors.