The Complaints

Ian Rankin's later Inspector Rebus novels all evinced considerable skepticism about the prospects for post-devolution Scotland, and The Complaints suggests that Rankin has not become appreciably more upbeat.  "Only Cuba was worse, apparently," notes our protagonist, Malcolm Fox, while reading the paper's glum reports about the national finances (14).  The novel's Edinburgh cityscape features closed stores, dirty streets, unfinished construction projects, and hopeless job-seekers; an air of mundane apocalypticism, if such a thing could be said to exist, hangs over the entire narrative.  This grim scenery accentuates the novel's noirish plot, in which Fox, an inspector in Complaints and Conduct ("The Complaints"),  finds himself trying to figure out why up-and-coming DS Jamie Breck has been identified as part of a child abuse ring.  As the conspiracy develops increasingly intricate loops, Fox winds up pursuing ethical (and criminal) lapses in the upper echelons of the police force, while also seeking, perhaps unbeknownst to himself, some measure of personal redemption.

Given the novel's noir ancestry, it's no shock that our detectives are on the dysfunctional side.  Fox's nickname may be "Foxy," but he is quite deliberately colorless, even anesthetized. His clothes are be in strong shades of blue (4), and his front door yellow (14), but the vividness of his objects contrasts starkly with his near non-existent emotional life.  Divorced, semi-alienated from his sister, and not always up to seeing his father (now in a nursing home), Fox appears to spend most of his leisure time figuring out what to eat (unenthusiastically) for dinner, watching DVDs, or rearranging his bookshelves.  Although Jamie Breck at least has ambition and a personal life, he also regularly retreats for hours into a WoW-style game called Quidnunc--which, translated literally, suggests both his immediate problem (being under surveillance) and Scotland's problem.  "What now?" indeed. 

Surveillance, in fact, turns out to be lurking at every corner.  CCTV; cell phone tracers; bugs; keylogging; credit card reports; old-fashioned spying.  Although the omnipresence of modern surveillance technologies tends to go without saying in contemporary crime fiction, Rankin makes more use of its implications here--for both the narrative and the crime genre itself.  The world of surveillance reduces everyone, suspects and non-suspects alike, to a collection of neatly-categorized facts--yet these facts (or, sometimes, "facts") produce only the illusion of transparency.  Jamie Breck's credit card trail turns out to be fiction, while detective Annie Inglis' file fails to reveal the existence of a son.  In the logic of this world, Fox's private non-life makes a certain amount of sense: he seems, at first glance, to have been reduced to exactly the type of event that can be traced (food purchases, for example).  But facts garned from surveillance, like facts garned from historical research, make no sense without narrative context: as the novel's increasingly loop-de-loop plotting demonstrates, technological advances neither wipe out the need for masterful (or professional) story-telling, nor ensure that these stories will be authentic.  (As we see at the end, in a nice subversion of the classic summation scene, even the good guys can badly misread the evidence.)  At the same time, characters wind up hyper-conscious of their own endless "screen time," devoting conspicuous chunks of time to figuring out ways of staying off the encroaching grid. 

One of the problems emerging from this morass turns out to be that old standby, free will vs. determinism.  Relatively early on, Breck tells Fox that "'I think we decide how things are going to be, and we make those things happen,'" to which Fox responds, "'Far as I'm concerned, stuff just happens and goes on happening and there's not a lot we can do about it'" (104).  A bit later in the conversation, Fox elucidates his position: "'Adverts tell us what to buy, government tells us how to live, technology tells us when we've done something wrong'" (105).   If Fox's escape from his self-imposed purgatory turns out to come through ignoring the rules he himself is paid to enforce--becoming "'Action Man,'" as Breck quips (257)--his sister Jude's ongoing love for her abusive boyfriend, whose murder brings Fox figuratively back to life, complicates any simple dichotomy between action and passivity.   This self-destructive attachment flummoxes Fox entirely, and the "solution" is not within Jude's control.  Moreover, thanks to the novel's noir heritage, it's not clear that individual agency is always possible, especially not in a society vulnerable to the ebb and flow of global forces beyond anyone's control.  What can you do? "'Stop complaining,'" says Fox's father (438)--a call to action, or a call to grim endurance?