Nah, Rebus wouldn’t have liked me

By Rikaza Hassan

“I can’t believe I’m missing Colombo Fashion Week,” says Ian Rankin as we sit down in the lobby of the Hilton where he spent his day long stay in Colombo. If only for a moment I am left hanging - there was no sarcasm in his voice, he is not grinning and John Malkovich does have a fashion line, but Rankin a fashionista? I laugh before I can help myself so it was a good thing that it was just the first of his jokes. “No, no,” he assures me, “I’ve got no interest in fashion at all.” He points to the navy blue t-shirt he’s wearing and tells me he got it from a high school in Edinburgh when they got him to open a building. He’s wearing it now, so obviously fashion is not something that matters to him at all, he explains.
Rankin was one of the British Council sponsored authors at the recent Galle Literary Festival (GLF) and even conducted a session in Colombo.
This being his first visit to the country, I ask him what Sri Lanka meant to him before. “Well, there’s tea,” he says, “Tea is very important. Scots are very proud of the role they played because many tea plantations were run by Scots. One of the big companies here, [George] Steuarts; Steuarts, that’s a very Scottish name.” He continues “Thomas Lipton was a Scot.”
How about the festival itself? “I’ve not been before and my neighbour, McCall Smith, came here two years ago and he and his wife said it was fantastic, that it was a really well organized festival and so I said I’m going to go. What I really liked about it is that I’ve been to many festivals around the world and often the writers are separated from everyone else. They’re at the same hotel, they talk to each other and they don’t get to experience the culture. At GLF they organized trips for us, we went sight seeing, whale watching, we were able to watch Sri Lankan drumming, dance and were able to meet lots of Sri Lankan writers.”
Rankin is a celebrity-type figure in Scotland. Go through back issues of Scottish papers and you would find not only stories about exhibitions dedicated to Rankin’s work but that almost any and every comment he makes in public makes the news. Like the joke that his wife had seen J.K. Rowling scribbling away at a cafe in Edinburgh at the time she was coming up with the idea for Harry Potter, or his observation (at that time) that it was female crime fiction authors who used graphic violence that made it to the best seller list and oh they also happened to be lesbians (no one took any notice of his observation also that it was male crime fiction authors who did not use graphic violence that seemed to make the best seller list as Val McDermid, a best selling lesbian crime fiction writer ripped Rankin’s comment to shreds calling it sexist among other things), and his belief that politicians use fear to make populations easier to control.
And while he finds the media frenzy around his every comment “boring”, he admits that being well known has its advantages.
“Once you become well known it gives you some power. My novels tend to contain political subtext. And I know that a lot of politicians upto and including PM Gordon Brown read my books; that the PM at the moment is a fan of my books. So if I mention, say something about immigration policy or asylum seekers I know that he will be reading it. So the temptation is that if there’s some political interest or consideration you can get access to these...”
“Because,” he adds, “writers don’t change the world but politicians can.”
Writers can’t change the world? “No. Big people like Bill Gates and presidents and prime ministers, these are the people who can change the world. Writers can influence opinion but I don’t think that on their own they can change the world.”

Rebus

As for Rebus, the flawed -- to say the least -- detective in his most famous series of novels, and whose characterization by Rankin has been much commended...
“Of course, Rebus lives in a little compartment in my head. He is to some extent my alter-ego,” replies Rankin to my question of just how much Rankin is to be found in Rebus. “We drink in the same pub, we drink the same drinks, we’re from the same background, we went to the same schools, same town. But at some point in our lives our paths diverged and he went to the army and I went to university.”
This mistaken belief that Rebus is based on Rankin leaves many a fan disappointed, he remarks.
“Readers are interested in Rebus and not me. When they come to Edinburgh they’re looking for him and not me. They get disappointed when they see me because I’m not him. I’m not as dangerous as him, not as damaged, not as complex. They come to the Oxford pub which is a real pub where he drinks and I drink, and the barman says that’s Ian Rankin and they say ‘Oh! that’s a disappointment because we wanted to meet Rebus’. I’m sorry but I’m not Rebus.”
If Rebus was real would they be chums?
“No, we wouldn’t be friends, no, because he wouldn’t like me. There are a lot of things about him that I don’t like. But he definitely wouldn’t like me. He would see me as too liberal, too soft on criminals, overeducated, never having had to do any hard manual work in my life, looked after by the state - free education until I was 26.”
Of one of the very few fictional detectives who age, the first Rebus novel was published in 1987 with Rebus aged 40 and he was retired in 2007 with Exit Music when Rebus turned 60 -- the mandatory age of retirement for police officers in Scotland. “The books exist in the real world in real time. So I said ok he’ll retire. He didn’t want to retire and I didn’t want him to retire but because of the realistic world they were based on he had to retire.”
“But I know exactly what he is doing,” he says making me want to get into his head more than ever. “He’s still a cop. He’s working for the police as a civilian in a very small unit that actually exists in Edinborough looking at unsolved crimes. It’s called the Scottish Criminal Review Unit, also known as SCREW. It’s staffed by one serving and three retired detectives. Rebus is one of the retired detectives. That gives me the opportunity to bring him back if I want to.” You are going to bring him back I ask, taken by (a bad) surprise at the fork that had appeared in what I had assumed was a straight road. “Maybe...” he says again leaving me aghast, “I don’t know. All I say is that it’s a possibility.” But even if Rebus never makes it back in his own novel, he may make an appearance in Rankin’s new, very different, detective Malcolm Fox’s. Or if Siobhan Clarke gets her own novel, Rebus will always be there, they being friends. “He could be helping her,” he says or adds with a grin “hindering her.”
Rebus unlike most fictional heroes is a real anti-hero. He’s a loner, disaffected with his job and has been a cop for 15 years when we first meet him. He’s seen it all and become quite cynical and questions whether policing actually changes anything. As Rankin says “Just because you lock people up doesn’t mean crime goes away --- new people come up to fill the vacuum.”
“The only thing that makes him realistic in my eyes is that the chief of detectives in Edinburgh said that he’d have a place for just one cop like him in real life,” states Rankin.
“He said there’s room for one maverick, there’s room for one bull in the china shop as long as they’re mostly controlled and they’re doing good work. And Rebus is devoted to his work. He lives for his job, to the extent that he’s let his family go ... pushed relationships aside with very few friends. And it’s nice that the chief of detectives said he’d like to have a guy like Rebus working for him.” There was never a dull moment with Ian Rankin, not once through the little over an hour that he sat talking to me while his wife was out shopping for spices.
I must admit that while I had always wanted to watch the Rebus tapes that played in Rankin's head, I never gave much thought to Rankin himself despite having read his intriguing standard bio both before and after reading each book. Until now. I should think that Rankin could give Rebus a run for the money, so I can't wait for the biography, or better yet autobiography.