Rookie Errors: Knots and Crosses

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin

Orion

Pp. 226

In a new introduction, Ian Rankin explains that he didn’t know Detective Sergeant John Rebus was to become such a huge fictional figure going on to star in more than a dozen novels. He notes his rookie errors in giving Rebus a complex back story and knowledge about things he might not have known (art and literature), combined with lack of understanding of things that he should, such as police procedure.

There is more than an element of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse about Rebus as Rankin is keen to show off his education with mixed metaphors and a classical background. “The skies were as dark as a Wagnerian opera, dark as a murderer’s thoughts.” He has faith, but does not hold with organised religion and he reads his Bible for comfort. “Ah, but it was not a nice world this, not a nice world at all. It was an Old Testament land that he found himself in, a land of barbarity and retribution.”

Rebus is patronising towards ideological students; needing to disassociate himself from others’ language; to prove himself better than that (he reads Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, don’t you know), he positions himself above the students who come into ‘his’ city. “Edinburgh was all appearances, which made the crime less easy to spot, but no less evident. Edinburgh was a schizophrenic city, the place of Jekyll & Hyde sure enough, the city of Deacon Brodie, of fur coat and no knickers (as they said in the west).”

Much is made of the city’s underside, hidden from the tourists and the students, but known to the likes of him. Rankin has created this world and he is proud of its darkness. As it becomes clear there is a criminal delighting in killing girls and taunting Rebus, many are shaken that this occurs in the Scottish capital. “But here, in Edinburgh! It’s unthinkable. Mass murderers belonged to the smoky back streets of the South and the Midlands, not to Scotland’s picture-postcard city.”

Rebus has a secret past – of course he does; he was a Para and trained for the SAS with a special Crack Assignments group.  He has buried his SAS experience in his subconscious, but it is clearly important to the case he finds himself investigating. Indeed, there are so many references and near flash-backs that the reader knows this trauma has something to do with the crime, even if he doesn’t. When he decides to delve into his subconscious, it is no surprise that the mind is a deep and curious place, with many layers, just like Edinburgh itself.

As well as being firmly fixed in place, Rankin sets his novel in a particular time, where pubs served different measures, and computers and digitisation are new. Rebus’s colleague tells him that the time is coming when all files will be on computers and work-horses like him will be obsolete. “It’s progress, John. Where would be without it? We’d still be out there with our pipes and our guess-work and our magnifying glasses.”

Unfortunately, another thing that anchors this novel in its time is the casual sexism and portrayal of women. Gill Templar is suspected of being a “ball-crusher” because she has opinions and stands up for herself, although she has appallingly unnatural dialogue. When she inevitably has sex with Rebus she is described less as a woman than as a doll. “She smelt good, like a baby on a fireside towel. He admired the shapes of her twisted body as they awoke to the thin, watery sunlight. She had a good body all right. No real stretch-marks. Her legs unscarred. Her hair just tousled enough to be inviting.” At least she fares better than another woman he picks up, who is written more like a cow in a herd than a human individual with thoughts and feelings.

And then there is his (unsurprisingly) ex-wife, whose body he describes as “pressed, pushed and prodded into a shape attainable only with the aid of some super-strong girdle. She was not, he was relieved to find, wearing as well as their occasional phone conversations would have had him believe.” Currently there are 23 John Rebus novels. Apparently Ian Rankin is now writing the character as a real policeman rather than a graduate’s ideal. We can only hope he has sorted out that adolescent misogynistic streak as well.

Supermarket creep

I hate supermarkets; they sap my soul.

There is so much stuff – so many varieties of things we don’t need in packages that we will just take home and throw away. We are faced with a plethora of options but no real choice. How many cereals can one person handle? I find myself standing in front of them staring at the multiple versions of maize and my eyes glaze over.

It starts with the vegetables. There are simply too many and they are all evenly spaced and displayed in colourful regimented mounds that seem plastic in their uniformity. And it’s so cold that I lose the circulation in my hands, while my mind loses the will to live.

The music is vile, and the forced jollity of the announcements telling me what’s on special in aisle four makes me want to cry at the thought that the real world is out there somewhere, but it’s not in here. What’s in here is bored-out-of-their mind women pushing trolleys and pandering to their brattish offspring.

It’s one of the domestic chores I like least, right up there with cleaning the toilet. And yet, I love a farmer’s market.

Here there is something seductive about the produce on offer. Even the names are alluring; the pale and fragrant lemon cheese; the still-warm vine-ripened tomatoes; the personally-pressed virgin oil; earthy new potatoes; regal purple aubergines; spiky but soft artichoke hearts. Some people believe that any list can be poetry if the right words are used, but that’s another matter.

I’m currently reading the brilliant Eating for England by Nigel Slater. He writes of the farmer’s market; “I shop there because I want to meet the people who grow what I eat, to experience the joy of seasonal shopping, to be as close as I can to where my food originates without actually getting my hands in the soil. And I suspect that, as I trundle up the hill with my recycled bag of cheap corn on the cob still in its fresh green husks and a swaying bunch of three-foot-high sunflowers, it probably allows me to feel just a wee bit smug about those shoppers with their supermarket packet of identically sized, overpriced, cellophane-wrapped green beans from Mozambique.”

When I was a student, I used to go to different shops to collect my groceries. There was a herbalist, a greengrocer, a fishmonger, a delicatessen (I couldn’t afford anything from there), a butcher, a baker and yes, even a candlestick maker (and I was going through that late teen/early twenties obsession with smelly incense and cinnamon and spiced pumpkin candles).

Things were cheaper, and I could talk to the people who sold them. Sure, it took all day to collect my bits and pieces wrapped in waxed paper but that was okay, because I had all day – I was inevitably procrastinating about writing an essay on eighteenth century English drama.

Now it’s far more convenient to drive to one soulless sterile building with blinding bright lights and no heart. (To be fair, when Big Fresh in Christchurch introduced singing vegetables to the greengrocery section it was truly terrifying).

And yet, some people like it. As I returned a trolley to its berth (is that what they call them? They should) a bloke smiled happily, “I love the supermarket; it’s full of hot women. I’m going to come here every day.” And there you have it; it may not be a bustling bazaar or a social souk, but it can be considered a meat market.