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As someone who can only claim to have visited Edinburgh, but who has much enjoyed Rankin's fiction, I'd add "jaundiced skepticism" to the "cross-dressing." And then there's the trainspotting theme ... Richard Richard Harris, Professor, School of Geography and Earth Sciences McMaster University http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/geo/faculty/harris/index.html [Ed: Rankin is Ian Rankin, Edinburgh's most famous crime novelist, who uses the city as his setting in novels such as _Exit Music_ (2008) and _Dead Souls_ (2000), both featuring his main character, Inspector Rebus. For more about the author and his books, see http://www.ianrankin.net/ , http://www.amazon.com/Ian-Rankin/e/B000AQ6XQE/ref=sr_tc_2_0 , and http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/edinburgh/rebus/index.html (the latter has nice photographs). _Trainspotting_ refers to both the 1993 Irvine Welsh novel and 1996 Danny Boyle film of urban despair and drug use set in Edinburgh. There's a nice passage from Robert A. Morace's _Irvine Welsh's _Trainspotting_: A Reader's Guide_ (Continuum, 2001) at http://books.google.com/books?id=q5VKzzUUbBIC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=trainspotting+and+edinburgh+and+urban&source=bl&ots=wuSX4tQ0jj&sig=o61ZiRp6thh8k9OXfRS27TUS0uI&hl=en&ei=aILeSovSDIv-tQPrmOjmDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CBsQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=trainspotting%20and%20edinburgh%20and%20urban&f=false that begins: "With few exceptions..._Trainspotting is set entirely in Edinburgh. But the Edinburgh of the novel is not the Edinburgh of the Fodor's-fueled popular imagination. It is not the Edinburgh of high teas, Scottish history, and the Edinburgh Festival. It is, rather, an Edinburgh that lies well beyond the festival's official Fringe, well north of the gentrified city center, between the postwar housing schemes of Muirhouse to the west and the rundown docklands of Leith (subsequently undergoing its own gentrification) to the east..... "The specificity with which Welsh sketches the urban setting -- streets, pubs, clubs, parks, public buildings, shopping precincts and bus routes -- contributes to the novel's realism. But there is more to Welsh's setting than that. His slice of Edinburgh life is the decrowning double not just of the city of tourists but of 'the Edinburgh virtues of hard work, respectability and godliness': the world according to Welsh is a place of unemployment, giro schemes, scruffiness, alcoholism, violence, drugs, prostitution, and the God of 'Granton Star Cause' (in _The Acid House_), a mean-spirited old drunk." (46) ] H-Urban: http://www.h-net.org/~urban/ (including logs & posting guidelines) Posting Address: h-urban@h-net.msu.edu / mailto:h-urban@h-net.msu.edu (Click)
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