The question of immigration is an interesting one to me, and I tend to align myself with supporters of open borders, although I am well aware of many of the complications that can arise from this policy. The husband, Johannes Lövgren, is dead before police arrive on the scene, but his wife Maria is left with a noose around her neck and dies shortly after she is taken to the hospital, but not before she wakes up and repeats the word ‘foreign,’ leading the police and the media to assume that her killer was an immigrant. This all becomes relevant in this novel when an elderly couple is murdered in their home. There is an uneasy relationship between the police department – for which Wallander works – and the government department that oversees the refugee camps, and whenever an immigrant is involved in a crime, the police blame the immigration department for not monitoring their refugees more carefully and the immigration department blames the police for not providing enough surveillance around the camps. Many of the characters in this novel grumble about this situation, and it seems as if the movement of these immigrants and refugees is not well monitored and tracked. Apparently Sweden’s policy at that time was for open borders, and anyone who wanted to live in Sweden could enter the country easily, although they had to live in refugee camps temporarily while they applied for residency permits. This novel is set in 1990, just a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Sweden at that time was facing an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. I did find that some of the larger issues raised in this novel were interesting, although like I said above I probably don’t have enough context to appreciate them fully. It’s spare in the boring way, and I found myself reading a few pages and then beginning to look for distractions. Its prose is spare, but it’s not spare in the Hemingway/Raymond Chandler/Raymond Carver sort of way. Like a human survivor of a successful frontal lobotomy, this novel can do everything that another detective novel can do, but it lacks personality. If anything, it seemed as if this novel was created by taking a good detective novel and lobotomizing it. Murray’s translation of Mankell’s prose) to be competent but bland. I’m not sure.įirst of all, I found Mankell’s prose (or, more precisely, Steven T. Maybe I’m getting tired of detective novels, or maybe some of the issues raised in the novel would be more interesting if I knew more about Swedish culture and politics. There is nothing in this premise to suggest that the novel shouldn’t be engaging, but I don’t know. Against a backdrop of a separation from his wife, a lack of communication from his adult daughter, a burgeoning affair with a married woman, his struggles with what is probably alcoholism, and a growing awareness of his father’s decline into senility, Wallander and his colleagues manage the investigation of a double homicide and its complicated aftermath. It’s premise is very ordinary and formulaic (not that this is a bad thing in detective novels, necessarily): Kurt Wallander is a seasoned detective who manages even the diciest cases with ease but can’t seem to keep control of his personal life. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I wanted to or as much as I expected to. In 2008, the University of St Andrews conferred Henning Mankell with an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in recognition of his major contribution to literature and to the practical exercise of conscience.I don’t read detective novels very often, but I do tend to enjoy them when I do. His prizewinning and critically acclaimed Inspector Wallander Mysteries continue to dominate bestseller lists all over the globe and his books have been translated into forty-five languages and made into numerous international film and television adaptations: most recently the BAFTA-award-winning BBC television series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh.ĭriven by a desire to change the world and to fight against racism and nationalism, Mankell devoted much of his time to working with charities in Africa, including SOS Children’s Villages and PLAN International, where he was also director of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo. Henning Mankell (1948-2015) became a worldwide phenomenon with his crime writing, gripping thrillers and atmospheric novels set in Africa.
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