Ian Rankin
THE NAMING OF THE DEAD
432pp. Orion. £17.99.
0 7528 6858 6
For a number of years now critics have been predicting the demise, figurative or otherwise, of Ian Rankin’s long-serving detective inspector John Rebus. But Rankin’s nineteenth novel featuring the surly DI has a more than usually funereal feel. Opening at the cremation of his brother Mickey, it finds Rebus a year away from retirement, wearily telling himself that he “reckoned he would survive”.
Rankin does not confine his elegiac tone to Rebus, but extends it out over a whole generation, and the values they represent. Although it takes its title from the lists of names of dead Iraqi civilians read out by protesters at the Edinburgh G8 summit in 2005, The Naming of the Dead is more truly concerned with the 1960s generation of forty years before, and the waning of their idealistic attitudes.
This, rather than the murder mystery that moves the plot, is the main interest of the book. Rankin’s G8 protesters are a well-meaning but naive collection of “tourists”, ageing hippies such as the parents of Rebus’s sergeant, Siobhan Clarke. They are “nearly sixty” and “paunchy” with receding hair, entirely out of their depth both in the sink estates where Edinburgh council has located their temporary campsite and on the protest marches themselves, overrun by violent anarchists and local hooligans. The Live-8 concerts here seem to consist of little but the reunions of old rockers like Pink Floyd and The Who, their messages as out of date as their music. Even the summit itself has no purpose: “the political deals had already been done”, Rankin tells us. “The real business had been thrashed out in advance.”
Indeed, almost everything here seems affected by obsolescence. Examples of new technology are everywhere, but they feel alien and out of place. “The students who used the cafeteria brought laptops and iPods”, Rankin observes, as if naming strange foreign objects. The very structure of The Naming of the Dead is modelled on the four “sides” of the ancient double LPs that Rebus listens to incessantly, as if even it belongs to a world already gone.
However, Rankin is neither a misty-eyed sentimentalist (despite his love for vintage music, references to which fill the novel), nor a bitter baby boomer. Instead, he treats the concept of the memorial, the “naming of the dead”, as the centre of a pressing ethical question. Rebus becomes caught up in the business of the G8 by accident while investigating an old case, the murder of a rapist, reopened by the discovery of a piece of the victim’s jacket at a folk pilgrimage site. The clothes of two more sex offenders are later discovered at the “Clootie Well”, each representing a murder case left unsolved by detectives unwilling to devote proper investigations to dead sex criminals. This grisly memorial forms an uneasy counterpoint to the nostalgic platitudes of the G8 marchers: if the dead deserve to be remembered, do they also deserve justice? And if so, should that justice extend even to the subjects of outraged newspaper headlines?
Not every aspect of the novel is successful. The bad guys fail to come alive. Rebus’s nemesis of the moment, a Special Branch officer called Steelforth (named with a nod to Dickens’s affable bully), is an obvious stereotype, while the business tycoon, Richard Pennen, is a two-dimensional capitalist. For the most part, however, Ian Rankin brings his characters to life with precision, and handles the novel’s complex thematic relationships with his usual skill.
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Tom Perrin is a PhD student in English at the University of Chicago.
