CRIME: The Man From BeijingBy Henning Mankell, translated by Laurie Thompson Harvill Secker, 367pp, £17.99
HENNING MANKELL made his name internationally as a writer of police procedural novels whose depressive detective, Kurt Wallander, seemed a Scandinavian cousin of British TV’s Inspector Morse. There was the same suggestion of emotional depths in the characters’ moody solitariness and dysfunctional private lives, of sensitive souls at odds with the world and themselves, the same implication that society itself was somehow out of joint, with, in Wallander’s case, a gloomy, social democratic Swede trying to put some of it right.
In neither the Morse TV series nor the Wallander novels were politics or social analysis made overtly present; a landscape and cultural ambiance were evoked, characters developed and a plot unfolded. Viewers and readers could draw their own conclusions and were, I imagine, happy to be left free to do so, or not.
Initially in The Man from Beijingit seems we know where we are, that we are back in familiar Mankell territory, even if the author is introducing us to a new main character in the person of Judge Birgitta Roslin, a middle-aged woman in a cooling marriage, with a taste for fine wines, suffering empty-nest syndrome, panic attacks, high blood-pressure and uncertainty about the worth of her life as she has lived it. And, as in the Wallander series, the novel begins with a shocking event that presents investigating officers with not only a case to solve but with a grotesque infraction of apparent normality that seems to open up vistas of evil intent that a secular society cannot easily comprehend.
Nineteen inhabitants of a tiny northern hamlet are found dead in mid-winter, with signs that some of them have been horribly tortured before being cruelly dispatched with multiple knife-wounds. The only clue is a red ribbon, perhaps left behind at the scene of the massacre by the assassin or assassins. The detail of the red ribbon is a characteristic Mankell touch, for explanations for the bizarre events that open his Wallander novels usually depend on such precise, apparently inexplicable clues. However, as we read on we realise that the red ribbon is less a clue than a symbol of the interweaving threads of an increasingly complicated narrative.
That narrative swiftly bifurcates into the investigation conducted by the police (which leads to an arrest, confession and suicide) and a private one conducted by Judge Roslin (that leads to countries in four continents and further violent deaths). Then, just as the judge seems to be getting closer to what might have happened in that Swedish hamlet, the author shifts genre, as it were, bringing us a historical recreation of 19th-century feudal China and of railway-building North America in the same period. A grim story is told of Chinese peasants fleeing poverty for a coastal city, there to be kidnapped and sold into slavery as railway workers in Nevada. One of them manages to survive and make his way back to China where he leaves a written record of his sufferings and those of his dead brothers.
A further shift in narrative perspective takes us to 21st-century Beijing and the world of a Chinese business tycoon who truly believes it is glorious to get rich and who who is prepared to do anything to attain and sustain that state. He emerges as the book's larger-than-life but less-than-convincing, cardboard-cut-out psychopath. But what also emerges is that Mankell is less interested in this book in the working out of his plot (which by the end collapses in violent, all too-convenient improbability) than in global geo-politics. As he takes his heroine to Beijing, to Zimbabwe (with a cameo appearance from Robert Mugabe) and to Chinatown in London in a tale of dynastic revenge and deadly sibling disagreement, Mankell chooses to engage quite overtly with the issue of China's putative emergence as a great power (the action of the novel takes place two years before the Olympian extravaganza). The author allows for this as fictional preoccupation by making Judge Roslin a lapsed Maoist keen to observe what has become of the modern country (in the 1960s, like our own Internationalists, she had chanted slogans from the Great Helmsman's Little Red Book), but it's all rather heavy-handed, cliched and interesting only in as much as it indicates how confused Western leftists and liberals are by the spectacle of China's rampant economic growth, single-party control and brutal legal regime (the novel includes an execution of a man for corruption, shot pour encourager les autres). However, Mankell does make one extraordinary, profoundly troubling suggestion in his book.
The author imagines a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy, assembled to consider the crisis posed to their continued political leadership of the country by many millions of peasants whose expectations are for a standard of living akin to that enjoyed by Chinese city-dwellers. A paper is presented that argues that large numbers of Chinese peasants must be exported as planters to the empty spaces of the African continent. Through this method, the Middle Kingdom can cope with its ancient fear of chaos and secure its future as the dominant power of the new century. As the plot proceeds, it is clear that Mankell suspects that this process has begun and that though he has admiration for how China, in the last 40 years, began to overcome its own history of colonial humiliation by the West, he is concerned that a new colonial foray may be afoot in the continent where he spends much of his time. So The Man From Beijingmay be a timely work of warning clothed as fiction.
Terence Brown is a literary and cultural historian
