Rebus at rest

Published on Saturday 8 September 2007 00:43

EXIT MUSIC

BY IAN RANKIN

Orion, 400pp, 18.99

IT'S BEEN WELL HERALDED. THIS, Ian Rankin's 17th full-length Rebus novel, sees Edinburgh's most famous policeman on his last case as the clock ticks and the desert of retirement stretches out before him. The top brass will be delighted to see him go. Criminals may breathe more easily. But readers will feel bereft, consoled only perhaps by the hope that if Sherlock Holmes managed to survive his encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls and return to action, John Rebus can't be snuffed out merely because he has handed in his warrant card.

And indeed, Rankin hints that this may be so. Hasn't Rebus in his last weeks conscripted DS Siobhan Clarke to help him trawl over some of his unsolved cases? Won't one of them (at least) surface over the next few months, requiring her to call on her old boss's expertise, however hesitantly, in the knowledge that doing this will infuriate her superiors? Surely ... surely it will be so.

But if it isn't, if Ian Rankin is really pensioning Rebus off, then now is the moment to take stock.

The first thing to say is that in the Rebus novels Rankin has not only produced the most sustained body of fiction devoted to modern Edinburgh, but has made it once again a city of the mind as Dickens made London and Chandler Los Angeles. He has changed the way people imagine the city.

It is a poetic vision of the place. And, though it is reinforced by much realistic and topographical detail, it is not ultimately realistic. The real city is less dramatic and less dangerous than the one Rankin portrays. Yet he persuades us otherwise.

Second, he has grasped, as few do, the possibilities of the crime novel, perhaps the only fictional form today that can incorporate all levels of society. In the modern literary novel, social connections are generally horizontal; the crime novel is capable of making vertical connections, of bringing low life and high life convincingly into contact with each other - as, for example, Scott did in The Heart of Midlothian.

Thus the Rebus novels have a richer texture than most literary fiction can aspire to these days. At one point in Exit Music he writes: "For a while now, he'd known the truth - that it wasn't so much the underworld you had to fear as the over world. Maybe that explained why Cafferty had, to all purposes and appearances, gone legit. A few friends in the right places and deals got done, fates decided. Never in his life had Rebus felt like an insider ... the less he felt he belonged, the more he came to mistrust the others around him, with their games of golf and their 'quiet words', their stitch-ups and handshakes, palm-greasing and scratching of backs."

Awareness of the corrupting power of money and influence permeates the saga. This too is a poetic vision. One can't believe that high officials in the First Albannach Bank, which takes the place of the Royal Bank of Scotland in this novel, are as unscrupulous, depraved and contemptible as they are shown to be, but in the course of reading disbelief is suspended.

Rebus himself is a romanticised hero, very much Chandler's "shopsoiled Galahad". There is enough detail to make him credible, even though we know that a policeman who behaved as he does would long ago have been dismissed from the force. Yet he works, as a private detective - the lonely man walking down mean streets - could never work. Rankin has from an early stage persuasively presented us with the edgy and jealous camaraderie of the team. Rebus is a slob, often violent, ready to take the law into his own hands, not above arranging, as happens here, for a nasty act of revenge to be possible, all in the name of his concept of justice. Yet there is a gritty integrity to him which commands our respect, and even affection.

Exit Music begins with the death of a dissident Russian poet in King's Stables Road in the shadow of the Castle Rock. It looks as if he is the victim of a mugging, but soon another death follows, and there is a connection between the two dead men. Then there are a number of Russian businessmen in town, one of whom knew the poet as a boy.

This particular businessman may be in bad odour with the Putin regime, and so intent on making a new life for himself in Edinburgh, invests his doubtless ill-gotten millions in the rash of developments that have followed the arrival of the Parliament, seizing opportunities that will present themselves if, as expected, Scotland becomes independent.

The Russian businessman has connections with politicians, as well as with FAB (the First Albannach Bank), as well as with Rebus's old enemy, the mobster Cafferty, now posing as a legitimate businessman. Moreover, all were in the Caledonian Hotel the night that the poet had his last drink there - bought for him, indeed, by Cafferty. Underworld and Overworld are seemingly hand-in hand. Rebus is on the trail and soon in trouble himself, in danger of being framed for attempted murder.

The pace is terrific and the plotting intricate. Red herrings are cunningly placed in the reader's path. Misdirection worthy of Agatha Christie at her best obscures the solution, though once it is revealed it is seen to have been prepared from the start. There is plenty of nastiness here and sordid sex, but it's never gratuitous; and one of the subplots involving a uniformed constable temporarily attached by DS Clarke to the CID team is both deft and disturbing. Rankin has grown in both skill and maturity with the series - which, properly speaking, starts with the fourth Rebus novel, Strip Jack, for Rebus is scarcely in the first three.

There is an air of melancholy to the novel. It emanates from Rebus, of course. He has been his work. The more the policeman, the less the man. "Monday morning, his alarm clock would be redundant. He could spend all day over breakfast, stick his suit back in the wardrobe, to be pulled out again only for funerals."

So is it the end? Rankin holds out to us addicts hope that it may not be. Rebus "couldn't see himself ever leaving Edinburgh. It was the oxygen in his bloodstream but still with mysteries to be explored. He'd lived there for as long as he'd been a cop, the two - job and city - becoming intertwined. Each new crime had added to his understanding, without that understanding ever nearing completion."

In their last conversation (in this novel, anyway) Cafferty, more convincing a character than he was originally, tells Rebus how as a boy in Gorgie he remembers how a bull would sometimes break free from the abattoir and run about the streets, " 'kicking its legs up at the thought of all that bloody freedom. Right up to the moment the gunman went down on one knee, got his aim right, and shot it in the head ... For a time I used to think that was me - the last free bull.'

" 'You're full of bull all right,' Rebus retorted.

" 'Thing is,' Cafferty said with a smile that was almost rueful, 'nowadays, I think maybe it's you, Rebus.' "

But we can't somehow believe Rebus's hour has struck, that he is ready for the abattoir. Harry Potter may be finished, but Rebus? Surely not.

Rankin and Rebus: the mystery continues ...

WITH this 17th Rebus novel (the 13th if we're counting from Strip Jack - Rebus purists can debate the details), it appears this is indeed the long goodbye. But Rankin's fans, and his publishers, can take heart that their man is far too savvy to nail the lid on the coffin.

"Is this the last of him? It would be very hard to let go," Rankin said recently. "I thought long and hard about all the possible things he could do, including bumping him off, obviously, and I couldn't do it. Rebus has been my punchbag and psychiatrist for the last 20 years. All I know is he retires. I haven't thought about anything after that, but he won't be retiring to Marbella."

As he told last month's Book Festival audience in Edinburgh, it all depends on two things: "Have I anything new to say - and is Rebus holding anything back from me?"

In the meantime, he's working on a libretto for Scottish Opera, a graphic novel, and a novella about an Edinburgh art heist. Busy, then.