Book Review: The Man from Beijing

Henning Mankell is a prolific Swedish mystery writer, whose police procedurals featuring Inspector Kurt Wallender have reached bestselling status in a number of countries and spawned a BBC miniseries.  His latest novel to reach U.S. shores (translated from the original Swedish), titled The Man from Beijing, interweaves a traditional whodunit with seemingly autobiographical details of his former Maoist political activism, and has received some of the best critical acclaim of Mankell’s career. 

The book begins with a mass murder in a tiny and remote Swedish village and the police investigation that immediately follows.  A federal judge, Birgitta Roslin, learns that some distant relatives were among the victims and begins her own parallel investigation.  Mankell weaves in diaries of an ancestor of Roslin’s who worked building railroad lines through the American West, as well as the story of Chinese immigrants who were subject to brutal conditions in providing labor for the same endeavor.  We learn that Roslin was a Maoist in her youth, and her sojourn to present-day China frames the country’s attempts to keep up with the stratifying effects of capitalism and leads to a key sequence in Mozambique, where Mankell lives today.

This sequence of locales and storylines implies a breakneck pace and clever interlocking of seemingly disparate threads, but unfortunately the book provides neither.  The early focus on the police investigation is largely dropped, and Roslin meanders listlessly through her portions of the story while events unfold around her, often without directly involving her.  Rather than forming a seamless whole, the sections of the book function almost independently, often killing narrative momentum.

Mankell’s novel treads the ground of espionage master John le Carré’s novels often use traditional cloak and dagger tropes to immerse the reader in exotic, non-Anglocentric scenarios.  His characters blend seamlessly into backdrops like British-rule Hong Kong (The Honourable Schoolboy), Nairobi (The Constant Gardener), East Germany just after the construction of the Berlin Wall (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), and Panama following the ouster of General Noriega (The Tailor of Panama).  The novels are often polemics, illustrating a particular controversy or event from a new persepctive.

While Mankell’s novel zigzags in location and time, from rural Sweden to 19th Century China, to America during the Gold Rush, to modern-day Beijing, the writing never fully evokes the setting.  Mankell packs the Chinese sections with his research on the failure of the benefits of modern industry to trickle down to the billions of Chinese peasants, but all of that research appears to do nothing more than set the stage for an anti-climactic confrontation between supporting characters that oddly does not take place in China at all.  While the judge travels around Sweden and China (and contemplates whether there is a future for her marriage), the investigation of the murders is given short shrift, particularly given that the novel opens focused entirely on the investigation.  And although a significant part of her youth was spent carrying Mao’s red book and dreaming of a role in the eventual peasant revolution, she appears strangely unmoved during her time in China.

Ultimately, Mankell’s reach exceeds his execution.  Some of the portions of the book work as set pieces, particularly the simple story of three Chinese brothers making the journey from an oppressively poor village across the ocean to America.  But the novel as a whole bursts the seams, with its many disparate elements failing to conceal the inadequacies of the plot.  Where le Carré’s novels are immersive, Mankell’s only skims the surface, bravely trying on many levels but failing to succeed on most.