gmtoday_small.gif

 


An ambitious mystery 
with much to say

February 18, 2010


"The Man From Beijing" by Henning Mankell ; Knopf (384 pages, $25.95 )

———

Some writers are novelists who write mysteries. Some are mystery writers who write novels now and again. Yet others, whatever they write, are novelists.

Henning Mankell belongs to this last class. A man who lives in both Sweden and Mozambique , Mankell is gaining fame here as a mystery writer, particularly for his Kurt Wallander books. Those got a huge boost when PBS aired the BBC three-film Wallander miniseries, starring Kenneth Branagh , on "Masterpiece" (a second series is now airing on the Beeb).

Mankell's latest, "The Man From Beijing," though not a Wallander novel, is the equal to any in that series. It's the work of a writer with the imagination, brains, resources, and joinerly craft needed to make thoughtful, challenging, exciting, artistic novels.

"The Man From Beijing" involves a mystery, to be sure, but it is a novel foremost. What I applaud most is its ambition. Its aim is broad and high, startlingly so: It's out to shake us up, say something about the world we're in, about the nature of our lives in this world at this moment.

It has much to say, much to question, about Sweden , Europe , Asia , Africa , the United States (each in its turn a setting in the book), socialism, communism, capitalism, history, democracy, racism, urban life, forensics, justice, love, friendship, and revenge. All these threads issue from the first word, interweave, and pay out right to the last.

The tale begins with a judge's swearing-in statement, then passes to a hungry wolf in winter, crossing the border from Norway into Sweden . That wolf is also the last thing we see. In between is a tale of horrific murder, Swedish law enforcement and justice, a marriage, a brother and sister, the spectacle of China convulsed in passage between one social system and another, and — the building of the railroads in the American West of the 1860s. All is worth it, unlikely as that sounds, and Mankell, who specializes in an urbane, understated portent, makes it work.

Against this vast, varied tapestry, the main cast is small. We meet Birgitta Roslin , a local judge swept up, by the merest link, in the crimes that spur the tale. In her 50s, introspective, emotionally involved in her cases, she worries over the light gone from her marriage. Timid and plucky by turns, she has a detective's mind and a gentle persistence. She never does anything remotely superhuman; instead, she's on the phone a lot. Her foibles make her believably human.

Birgitta is not the main character. That would be the man from Beijing himself, Ya Ru. He belongs to a family with ties to the older Communist hierarchy. Ya Ru himself, he's one bad capitalist. He has made billions through business deals, graft, and power brokerage, and for well and ill, he represents the coming China .

In his office towering high in the center of town, Ya Ru has a muscular splendor, searing foresight, an iron memory, and an ancient grudge. He also has an unshakable vision of a capitalist China in full roar, one he will profit from and help drive; for him, the socialist past is moribund. He's also a corrupt psychopath ready to do anything to get what he wants.

His sister is Hong Qui , as rigidly committed to the socialist past as her brother is to the capitalist future. Brother and sister have an icy war of words; their facedowns feel like fate itself, the conversation of present with past.

Hong will surprise us, for, amid her merciless devotion, she shows a rich inner life. By crazy-quilted circumstances, she becomes friends with Birgitta, who has traveled to Beijing with her friend Karin . From then on, an informal network of female friends faces off against a towering, male-dominated bureaucracy.

Birgitta and the Chinese siblings have family ties back to the racist enslavement of Chinese workers in building the American railroads. We meet Wang San and his brothers, kidnapped in Canton and forced into killing servitude on the rails. Their sufferings stand for the sick way the West came to dominance in the world. They are why, as Mankell writes, "Ya Ru hated everything English."

I am forced to say that the central vengeance in the novel seems somewhat improbable to me. And a few set-speeches strike me as somewhat textbooky. These flaws almost don't matter. As Birgitta realizes, this story is bigger than anyone in it (as all come to see): It's the turbulent sweep of time itself, geopolitics transforming the world at a scale that defeats the mind. Each character is right; each is wrong. Each is momentarily in control; all are deceived.

Throughout this remarkable work, Birgitta walks streets, of Swedish hamlets, of Helsingborg, London , Beijing , curious, driven, and fearful, sensing all that is beyond her. The deep past has us in its grip, and so does the inevitable yet-to-happen — the future we bring closer with our every step. In its appalling, invigorating sweep, Henning Mankell's "The Man From Beijing" is flavored with the grating tang of time's passage itself.

 


McClatchy-Tribune Information Services