The Man from Beijing, Swedish writer Henning Mankell's most recent novel, starts out promisingly enough: Nineteen people in the northern Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen, nearly the entire population of the little village, have been brutally, ferociously slaughtered, along with all their dogs and cats; even a parrot has been decapitated. (But the older hippie couple from Stockholm has survived, as has the Alzheimer-afflicted woman at the end of the street. Hmmm.)
Mankell's characters are typically engaging. Small-town cop Vivi Sundberg is a hard-working, hard-headed, physically imposing fiftysomething redhead, who approaches the unprecedented crime scene with diligence and imagination. Judge Birgitta Roslin, living and working in Helsingborg, well to the south, is just another shocked citizen, until she realizes that Hesjövallen is the village where her mother was raised, and that the victims include her foster grandparents, the Andréns. In fact, she is probably related to most of the victims.
The Man from Beijing, by Henning Mankell, Knopf Canada, 367 pages, $32
Sundberg's investigation stalls, despite massive international media attention. Weeks pass. The only clue is a piece of red ribbon; the police are baffled. Roslin, on medical leave because of high blood pressure and needing from distraction from a marriage that has become more habitual than loving, pursues her own investigation, making some interesting discoveries, not least among them an ancestor's journals about life as an immigrant in the United States in the 19th century, working on the construction of the transcontinental railway.
She also manages to discover the origin of the mysterious red ribbon and track the movements of a stranger who visited the area on the night of the gruesome murders. Finally, and most intriguingly, at about the same time as the Swedish slaughter, a family of Andréns in Nevada was similarly wiped out. But Sundberg is unimpressed, and when a reclusive, somewhat violent middle-aged bachelor is arrested on suspicion of committing the murders, the case seems to be closed.
In a way, the gore-drenched crime that opens the novel is just a McGuffin
But Roslin is not convinced. She is also persistent, feels the burden of her family involvement and has time on her hands. Following her instincts and her own set of clues, she heads to China. There she becomes entangled in the Chinese bureaucracy and meets a Chinese power couple, a brother and sister, whose story seems somehow entwined with her own.
The story in the Chinese side of The Man from Beijing begins as a straightforward, third-person narrative about three Chinese brothers who are kidnapped in 1863 to help build the cross-country railroad in the United States and end up as part of the crew on which Birgitta Roslin's racist, brutal ancestor is the foreman. After years of slave labour, one of them makes his way back to China, working for Swedish missionaries and, eventually, writing a journal of his own. Not surprisingly, the Chinese brother and sister who become involved with Roslin in Beijing are his descendants.
A long section of the book in the last quarter is a pocket history of Chinese communism; I confess I had to fight off the urge to skip pages here. That had never happened to me before in any Mankell book, whether one of his popular Kurt Wallander series of angst-ridden policiers or one of his non-Wallander mysteries. The story takes us back to Sweden, to London, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But well before the end of the book, it's pretty clear who killed the various Andréns, and why. Vivi Sundberg, one of the most interesting characters in the book, has long disappeared from the story.
In a way, the gore-drenched crime that opens the novel is just a McGuffin. Despite the gruesome crime and the detective procedural of the book's first half, it's not really a crime novel. Or rather, it's a crime novel awkwardly spliced to a historical family epic. The real point of the book turns out to be the history of Chinese enslavement in America, the course of communism in China and, in the grand scheme of things, the relationship between East and West. And in those terms, it's a great read.
H.J. Kirchhoff is the deputy Books editor for The Globe and Mail, and a great fan of Scandinavian crime fiction in general and Henning Mankell in particular.
