FICTION: Italian ShoesBy Henning Mankell, translated by Laurie Thompson Harvill Secker, 247pp. £17.99
THE INSPECTOR WALLANDER mysteries of Henning Mankell (recently brought to TV screens with Kenneth Branagh in mesmerising form as the morose, misanthropic Swedish cop) obey many of the rules of the genre that make the police procedural addictive fare for lots of us. These involve the detective as dissatisfied loner, at odds with station colleagues, loyal to the methods and instincts of a dead mentor, harassed by a dysfunctional family life and possessed of an unaccountable, even self-destructive devotion in a corrupt world to some ideal of justice, however flawed. When in Mankell’s fiction these elements are fused with an unerring sense of narrative pace (the rhythms of his tales are steady, cumulative, satisfyingly weighted with quotidian detail, interrupted by shocking, sometimes acutely distressing climaxes) and a capacity to make landscape and climate seem registers of the colder, darker reaches of the human heart, then we can tell ourselves, as we hunt out his latest, that it is literature we are looking for and not just the potboiling escapism that bedecks airport bookshops and so largely figures in the best-seller lists.
And there’s certainly a good deal in this; for as with the best of crime fiction (Chandler, James Lee Burke, Elmore Leonard), Mankell deals not only in character, plot and action, mystery and revelation, concealment and discovery, but also creates a world with its own mental and emotional atmosphere, its distinctive take on the way things are, that implies a vision of life itself. In Mankell’s detective fiction this is intimately dependent not only on his almost obsessive concern to make Wallander a creature in whom low spirits are a kind of solitary pleasure, a certainty in an uncertain world, but on his remarkable evocation of the southern Swedish region in which his tales are principally set. Its landscape is evoked as wearyingly flat, somehow featureless, a place of trees and wide fields, desolate shores. The province’s urban spaces seem oddly generic, as if stripped of historic, cultural significance, linked by roads but not by any ties of affection or national regard. All this gives the novels a sense of life lived in a place that has been hollowed out, as it were, rendered a zone of affective parsimony, where grotesquely violent, even obscene crimes act as horrifying assaults on a depleted normality. Only Wallander’s depressed endurance offers any kind of antidote to evil in a cold climate.
At moments in the Wallander novels Mankell indicates that he thinks of his work as an expression of disappointment that Sweden’s experiment in social democracy by the 1990s had failed, delivering an ill-fare state where welfare had been the objective. His new book, like others of his recent novels a straight literary fiction, certainly takes Swedish failure as a major theme. Indeed, its main character has led a life marked by devastating failures, both personal and professional.
As the novel begins, the 66-year-old narrator, Frederick Welin, has been holed up for 12 years on a remote island off the country’s east coast, his frozen feelings matched by the rigours of the northern climate. A daily act of masochistic immersion in ice-cold water bespeaks a conscience ill-at-ease, anxious for expiation. In the course of a year, opportunities for such expiation inexorably present themslves as his failures and mistakes of almost 40 and 12 years earlier catch up with him in encounters with the two women he has profoundly damaged in his lifetime. The first he abandoned without a word as a young man, the second he mutilated in an act of professional inadvertence when at the height of his career as a surgeon. His life-changing year also brings him the daughter he never knew he had and the unfreezing of an emotional life that had seemed set in permafrost.
MANKELL TELLS USin the text that his novel is set in a new millenium, but the book offers no ready promise of millenial hope for the new century. Rather in a book dominated by sickness, terminal illness and death, by age and the only end of age, it is how the last century has affected Sweden that haunts this chilly work. Welin's date with the past involves him leaving his island redoubt for a winter journey to the Swedish north. In a landscape of snow and ice, of near-impenetrable forests, he comes on individual Swedes, who, in alienated seclusion from society's mainstream, form mini-communities of almost pre-modern solidarity (as if to highlight how the book aligns itself with a deep past, one of its climaxes involves a form of Viking-ship burial). Some of them adopt the values of 1960s hippiedom, and there is even a mention of 1950s Teddy boys, those precursors of the counter-culture. Others represent, as does the Italian shoemaker par excellence, who helps give the book its title, commitment to a craft-consiousness that can only flourish far from the noise of traffic. Others are communities of the individaully damaged, whose vulnerabilty makes them vivid but doomed presences (a suicide is one of the most painful episodes in the book). All seem the product of a 20th-century Sweden that has failed its citizens, leaving them in a new century to survive as they may, where the state's writ scarcely runs (in the novel the state is present in the person of a hypochondriac postman).
IN THE WALLANDER novels the social message is almost entirely implicit in the texture of the various narratives. Landscape and setting work their passage without being thematically obtrusive. Conversations deal with the case in hand or with personal and domestic issues. In Mankell's recent "literary fiction", by contrast, this grounding in the actual can occasionally seem less sure-footed. It is as if the abandonment of a genre's demands has slackened the strings of the author's art somewhat. So in Italian Shoes, landscape, weather and setting, although powerfully evoked, can seem too overtly symbolic, conversations can strike a portentous note, alerting us in disconcerting fashion to the fact we are reading "literature". Which is perhaps to say that the discipline of genre fiction is artistically enabling to a certain kind of writer, who risks a lot when he forsakes it.
Terence Brown is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin