Ian Rankin & Inspector Rebus (13 page)

Perhaps Rankin should write a lengthy anthology of short stories, build them up over the next six or
seven years and release a heady tome. Maybe that way, without the constraints of Rebus being in them all, will he win the short story battle. If the anthology has an overall theme, say Edinburgh, exploring a multitude of different lifestyles and events, will he come somewhere close to a diverse novel-type of theme. It could be a very interesting – and perhaps humorous way – of seeing Rebus in retirement
(through one or two stories).

Am I implying by all of this that Rebus has stifled Rankin’s creativity? That he has taken Rankin away from more important work, like Sherlock Holmes did to Conan Doyle? Maybe I am, as far as Rebus has stopped Rankin from making more diverse fiction or, at least, having the opportunity of writing more diverse fiction. But who is to say that whatever else Rankin would
have written during the Rebus years would have been any better? Were the Jack Harvey novels?
Doors Open
? In honesty, it’s difficult to tell – I would personally think not, but it’s subjective. What we can say is: the 20 years of Rebus-related writings was excellent, we enjoyed the ride, and isn’t that what it’s all about eventually? Of course it is. That and the fact that Rankin is not as an ungrateful
father to Rebus as Conan Doyle was to Sherlock Holmes!

‘“If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roof, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most
outré
results, it would make all fiction
with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”’

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Case of Identity’ from
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

‘There is nothing I think very exceptional in my situation as a mental worker. Entanglement is our common lot.’

Experiment in Autobiography, Being the Autobiography of H G Wells

T
he Hanging Garden
is one of the most underrated novels in the Rebus series. We first encounter our hero saying goodbye to his daughter after a pizza. His obvious affection for her
in juxtaposition to the manacles of his job is clear: they have cancelled their dinner appointment many times because of his calls to duty, but she understands and he is grateful for that. Rebus knows he doesn’t see her enough but he’s pleased that she has a level of self-confidence – independence – and is building her life normally with a boyfriend and no apparent mental scars after the break-up
of the parental home. There is a sense of relief and gratitude in Rebus’s attitude before he gets entangled straight away with a surveillance-gone-wrong and a gangland hospital case!

Rebus is the archetypical professional copper, overworked and underpaid, who lives in a flat he detests and not just because of the student parties next door. He is forever searching for fulfilment in life: love,
home, lifestyle and job, but is destined – or determined – never to achieve it. Although clichéd, this situation is typical of a large proportion of working people, not just civil servants and people in the emergency services. The unfulfilment of life is there throughout society and exposing that, discussing that and seeing people try to wriggle out of that is one of the main strengths of the Rebus
series. Rankin’s audience can identify with that. It is this accessibility that is key to the commercial success of the series.

Rebus gets under the skin of life. He looks under the stone and examines what wriggles beneath. Then he gives it a prod to irritate it and this is where readers delight in the character’s exploits. When Rebus is confronted with a lawyer representing a gangland victim
in
The Hanging Garden
, he quickly sees through the facade, understanding straight away that he is only there to ensure the victim doesn’t give any secrets away. ‘We’re here to listen to whatever bunch of shite the two of you eventually concoct for our delectation…’ Rebus says. This hard-nosed approach to his work is unconventional but effective, but it has made Rebus as many enemies as friends
during his working life. Interestingly,
The Hanging Garden
introduces us to another side of Rebus’s personality, when he suddenly finds himself looking at his daughter unconscious on a bed, the victim of a hit-and-run.

The shock, anger and despair of a loving parent are suddenly brought to the fore. Rebus forgets momentarily that he is a policeman. He is now a victim’s father and he pounds a
wall and demands immediate justice. When he calms down he realises that Rhona – his ex-wife – is exclusively responsible for his daughter’s good upbringing. A memory of his fatherly responsibilities on a family holiday vindicates this: he was left in charge of his baby daughter as she buried his feet in the sand. He fell asleep and woke up with her missing. Rhona was distraught. They found Sammy in
a hollow in a sand dune. They pulled her out. Rebus punched the roof of the dune and the whole thing collapsed; his daughter could have been killed or buried alive and it would have been his fault. But was it his fault now? Was the accident a deliberate stab at Rebus from someone with a grudge?

If ever the Jekyll and Hyde side to Rebus’s personality was exposed in a novel, this is it. There is
the normal everyday love for his daughter and dedication to his work; then there is the ex-SAS man who seeks revenge for a ‘too professional’ hit-and-run on his daughter. Rebus will play unfair in order to bring the criminal to justice – his personal version of justice – but one has to be careful what one wishes for when looking for justice…

The Hanging Garden
succeeds on many levels. To begin
with it’s a strong, gritty story about the power struggle between gangs. It’s also about the tolerance level between the Police Force and organised crime. Then it’s about John Rebus, who cuts through all that bullshit to get at the criminals he wants but tries desperately to protect his vast assortment of women – estranged friendships – at the same time; it would be comical if not so bloody sad.

I’m making Rebus sound like Dirty Harry here, but he doesn’t need a 44 Magnum – he’s got his bare hands and perceptive mind to pin his victim to the wall. No bullets are required. He’s a tough, broad, middle-aged man with a lot of baggage but somehow he gets the job done, albeit not in the most considered way.

The Hanging Garden
takes on other dark themes too, such as refugee prostitution and
consequently racialism on a wide scale. It brings the north of England – Newcastle – together with Scotland’s capital city in order to show the scope of the criminal underworld’s networking scene and just what depth of corruption the Police Force have to deal with. But Rebus is prepared to meet that corruption head on, if only to take his revenge on the person who hurt his daughter.

He explains
to a colleague that there is no line to cross when doing his duty. This probably explains why he is so poor in personal relationships: Rebus is too good at his job to have a deep and meaningful relationship and this is clearly illustrated in
The Hanging Garden
. Once he breaks a suspect down and follows up another lead, his day is already overlong. So he calls his already estranged girlfriend,
Patience, to ask how late he is permitted to be before she disowns him once more! He gets deeply embroiled in the characters that conspire against each other – and him. When Telford – a rival of Cafferty – tells Rebus to get in a car because he wants to show him something, Rebus, ‘world’s craziest cop’, does. That’s where he steps over the invisible line between the good guys and bad. He’s not afraid
of the baddies, he knows they wouldn’t do anything stupid – and there lies a mutual respect.

Rebus pin-balls between Telford and Cafferty in
The Hanging Garden
and he is happy to do so: he needs to know who is lying to him and who is telling him the truth. Rebus sets things in motion by leaving his desk and making things happen. He then drops into the unfolding events to analyse and solve the
case. In that respect he is a little like Sherlock Holmes with Siobhan as his ever-astute but still-marvelling sidekick. It’s only towards the end that all the ends get tied together and the truth becomes clear. Some could argue that that is a little too neat but let us remember that wasn’t necessarily the outcome of either
Let It Bleed
or
Black and Blue.

All of this really showed how far away
from his creator Rebus had grown.

The Hanging Garden
was really the first book Rankin wrote as a bestselling writer and he really delivered a no-holds-barred story that worked on different moral levels. The theme of exploitation of Eastern European women in international prostitution was played against the search for ex-Nazis and the truth behind the Rat Run (the exodus of Nazis from Germany
at the conclusion of the war via underground tunnels). Moral dilemmas, racialism, exploitation, the corruption of groups – gangs, political parties – and individuals are all part of the jigsaw of evil that Rankin explores in
The Hanging Garden
, but he never over-eggs it. He unfolds each layer carefully until he is prepared to bring in his satisfying conclusion.

But with
The Hanging Garden
, Rankin’s
conclusion harks back to the book’s opening quote from T S Eliot: ‘If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.’ It was General Patton who was convinced that in order to win a war you had to study history and see where the current conflict was repeating itself and then learn by history’s mistakes. What Rankin – T S Eliot – tells us is that the same or similar things will happen
time and again and the outcome will be different enough to be repeated throughout the whole of future history. History is a self-replicating process that has as many repeat performances as any given Shakespearean play. And like Shakespearian plays the world remembers war. In his Afterword to
The Hanging Garden
, Rankin stated that a Nazi-inflicted extermination of a whole village depicted in the
story actually happened. It was Saturday 10 June 1944 that 3rd Company, Das Reich, killed up to one thousand people in Oradour-sur-Glane in France, and Oradour still stands as a shrine. ‘The village has been left just the way it was on that day in June 1944,’ Rankin said.

Right at the end of the book Rankin reminds the reader of the racial issues tackled in the book. He shows disgust at the 12,000
foreign volunteers of the Waffen SS who were still receiving pensions from the Federal German government in 1998 and marvelling why nobody was really held accountable for the holocaust at Oradour. Perhaps that is one aspect of his time in France that wasn’t so pleasant to learn about, but he made a point of highlighting it, Rebus-style, when he got the chance.

‘… who would bare the whips and
scorns of time,

The oppressors wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office… The undiscovered country,

From whose bourn no traveler returns…’

William Shakespeare,
Hamlet

R
ankin has always stated that Rebus lives in real time, so there was always a time bomb ticking towards his natural retirement, which the author couldn’t do anything about. That said, Rankin explained that fans had come up with many ways in which the series could continue after the inevitable retirement: Rebus could unofficially assist Siobhan, or Rankin could
go back to Rebus’s early cases, i.e. those that occurred before
Knots and Crosses,
and write about them.

When Rankin was winding Rebus down he didn’t want to consider any of the above options. The copper had to retire and that was the reality of the situation – just as in real life. And it is this association with reality that brings credibility – inevitability – to the series. Everything, after
all, must come to an end. However, a line from
The Hanging Garden
does give interesting pause for thought. When Rebus has written an account of his whereabouts over the past 24 hours, it is stated: ‘Back at his desk, he started on his memoirs…’

Surely in retirement the methodical Detective Inspector could make some sense – justification for his own piece of mind – by writing his memoirs? It could
probably allow Rankin to re-write one of his previous Rebus books from Rebus’s point of view – and have a completely different outcome! It would also allow Rankin to explore the character’s army days and formative time on the Police Force. But maybe there is cold comfort from the fact that we know Rebus did the best job he could and that is the final epitaph – the only epitaph – that anyone is
left with when contemplating their prime and the work they did throughout their lifetime.

‘They learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie had encountered on their behalf. “It is for the sake of you girls – my influence, now, in the years of my prime.” This was the beginning of the Brodie set.’

Muriel Spark,
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

There is a similarity in philosophy of life
between Rankin’s work and that of Spark. Clearly, something would have rubbed off on Rankin after studying the authoress’s work at university. But there is something more: that familiarity with Edinburgh past, from Deacon Brodie to the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s almost as if Rankin has taken the Brodie set – that little clique of like-minded people – one step further and into the 21st century.

In a
Book and Magazine Collector
interview (issue 221), Rankin mentioned a whole bunch of Scottish writers as influences, or important to Scottish literature. You won’t find him talking too much about Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare: frankly, there are too many people who could do this. No, Rankin wants to explore his own country’s talent, and he is right to do so. As Bono would joyously
shout out at Slane Castle ‘This is our tribe!’ there is the same level of pride when Ian Rankin gives away copies of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
to the youth of Edinburgh to try and encourage them to read more. And like every U2 fan who wants to experience Ireland through their favourite band’s music, Rankin allows you to explore the real Scotland through its/his fiction.