The puzzle of Rebus
Allan Massie
A QUESTION OF BLOOD by Ian Rankin Orion, £17.99, pp. 360, ISBN 0752851101 Arguably no Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott has had the commercial and critical success that Ian Rankin now enjoys. He may even be said to have invented modern Scotland, or at least modern Edinburgh, for his readers, just as Scott did in his time. If Rankin's Scotland is bleaker, grimier, and less obviously romantic than Scott's, well, that may be how it is.
His publishers claim that ten per cent of all crime novels sold in Britain are Rankin's. This is extraordinary. Yet he didn't set out to write crime fiction. When I first knew him, just over 20 years ago, he was writing poetry, short stories (rather sensitive ones), and working on a thesis about some aspect of Muriel Spark's novels. At that time I had one of these creative writing posts at Edinburgh University, and he used to bring me what he had written for comment, though he was actually no longer a student but working as a temporary clerk for the Inland Revenue. (The taxman has done rather better out of him since.) I took one of his stories for a magazine I was editing, and later introduced him to his first London publisher, Euan Cameron at the Bodley Head. This gives me a tiny stake in his career, but he would have achieved all he has achieved if he had never met me.
The Bodley Head then published his first Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses. Though Rebus was a policeman, Rankin didn't think of this as a crime novel. To his mind it belonged (as indeed it does) to an older Scottish literary tradition: the novel that treats of the theme of duality, as written by Hogg, Stevenson and Spark. But Rebus established himself in his imagination, appealed to readers, though not at first in great numbers. So A Question of Blood is the 14th full-length Rebus novel, and one of the best.
Superficially the Rebus novels are police procedurals, and indeed they are popular, I'm told, with officers of the Edinburgh and Lothians force. This may be partly because policemen hanker to be as tough and bloody-minded as Rebus, and it is also, I would guess, because Rankin shows us just how wearing and frustrating, how demanding of energy and nervously disturbing, police work can be; shows us also how the police know themselves to be feared and resented, needed and rarely thanked.
But they are not really police procedurals. Rebus himself would have been out of any real police force long ago. He is the rebel within, insubordinate, unreliable, prepared too often to take the law into his own hands. In this new novel he is suspended from duty, not for the first time, and himself a murder suspect. He would fail any psychological profiling, and he knows it.
He teeters on the verge of being a stereotypical hard cop. His personal life is a mess. His wife left him long ago. He scarcely ever hears now from his only child, a daughter. He has lost touch with his brother and cousins (though he happens on one here when the cousin's son is murdered). Tentative relationships with women come to nothing. He has few friends, and some, the closest, are dead. He is near-alcoholic, or more than near. His flat is a tip. He lives on junk food, carry-outs, beer, whisky and cigarettes. Though there is a mention of books in his flat in this novel, I can't remember him reading except for information. He listens to hard rock; at least, I think that's what it is, not recognising more than the odd one of the bands named. He is short-tempered, violent, secretive and duplicitous. I don't think he likes himself much.
Yet he evades the stereotype. He lives in his own right. Chandler saw his Marlowe as 'a soiled Galahad'. That was romanticising him as Fleming romanticised Bond, and Rankin stops just short of romanticising Rebus. Yet there is something of the soiled knight errant in him. He is the man we rely on to do the dirty work on our behalf. He is capable, Maigret-like, of feeling sympathy for the habitual criminal, because he knows the wasteland from which he has emerged; knows too that if he had taken a different turn in the road, he might be that himself. But he is hard on those who take to crime because of their greed, their lust for power, their excessive self-regard.
He resents authority, yet acts as its agent. Not likeable, he is nevertheless admirable. A man haunted by memories of failure, he comes with each book closer to breaking point. He relies now, emotionally, more than he would care to admit, on his subordinate, DS Siobhan Clarke. Near
the end of this book he kisses her on the lips. I wonder that that means. I guess they do too.
Rebus lives. So does Rankin's Edinburgh. It's the real city, but also an imaginary one, or, better, an imagined one. Rankin is adept at getting the physical details of the city right, at using this to give his fiction verisimilitude. He does this so well that there is now a market for tours of Rebus's Edinburgh. Those who hope to visit the independent school in South 0ueensferry which is the setting for the murders in this novel will, however, be disappointed. It doesn't exist.
The plot and its elaboration are adequate. They don't need to be more than that. Rankin might agree with Scott, who asked what the plot was for, save to bring in fine things. He doesn't need a clever plot because his narrative moves so briskly and compellingly along; he is often at his best in scenes, like one here in the state mental hospital (or whatever its new PC name is) which actually contribute little to the unfolding of the plot; indeed he is always good when Rebus is led up a blind alley. Sometimes his prosperous and respectable characters are less than wholly convincing, but this is partly because they are presented to us through Rebus's eyes, and he never fully understands them. The MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament) is a caricature, but an enjoyable one who will be relished by all those who look on our new parliament without much enthusiasm.
He is an addictive writer, which accounts for his immense popularity, but he is also a serious and disturbing one. The crime novel has moved far beyond mere entertainment, and he is one of the novelists who have taken it there. He presents to us the anatomy of a society permeated by crime, one where feral children roam the streets and even the advantaged young may be more than half in love with death, where the police fight daily battles ilia war that will never be won. Like Buchan Rankin shows us 'how thin is the protection of civilisation'; but in his world there are fewer certainties than there were in Buchan's. The Presbyterian assurance that used to inform Scottish society is scarcely even a memory. The communal values that gave cohesion to the old working class have crumbled. There are few supports standing. Rebus himself survives by means only of the will and his sense of himself; and these too are threatened.
Rankin is still only in his early forties, ten years younger, I should say, than Rebus. How much longer Rebus can go on, how much further can he take him — these are questions that must occupy him. What he does after Rebus is an interesting question. To track back and offer us some of Rebus's earlier cases would be to reduce the novels to mere entertainment, hugely popular no doubt, but a betrayal of his remarkable talent.
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