Firewall

Firewall

By Henning Mankell

Forget Afghanistan.

Forget the Congo. Never mind Somalia, Rwanda or Colombia. Safe havens, all of them, compared to the world's most dangerous country. If the novels of Henning Mankell serve as any indication, the country in which you are most likely to be murdered in cold blood is undoubtedly Sweden. And it's not run-of-the-mill sort of violence one needs to fear while traveling the Great White Nørd but rather the grisly variety. The sorts of crimes that require a full forensic team to identify the remains. The sort of crimes that have remains rather than simply bodies. Mexico City is as secure as a bank compared to Stockholm, Malmo and Ystad.

Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander Series serves as a reminder to anyone thinking of traveling or (worse!) relocating to Scandinavia: Think twice, O weary traveler for thou goest forth into the realm of Scandinavian Crime fiction, the most specific pop culture genre after Spaghetti Westerns, Lucha Libre and German Scheiße videos.

Firewall is the eighth book in the Kurt Wallander Series but it is only the second (after Faceless Killers, the first in the series) that I have read personally. Firewall begins with the seemingly senseless and disturbingly violent (of course) murder of a taxi driver by two teenage girls. Another man dies a natural death on the other side of town. But slowly Wallander and the Ystad Police Department begin to piece together a cyber-conspiracy that combines the two cases and expands its reach intercontinentally. Along the way there are any number of grisly and disturbing murders (just in case the original murder wasn't gristly and disturbing enough). And to think there are seven novels preceding Firewall (and that doesn't even account for the uncountably number of murders that occur in the novels of Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo). Given the population density compared with the total number of violent murders, well... Scandinavia is a dangerous place.

I was a bit concerned about jumping to book eight in the series. I worried that i was breaking the continuity of the narrative, and there were some unavoidable spoilers along the way, but I was surprised how well Henning was able to contain the story within the confines of Firewall without divulging the previous stories. I like that can always go back and read any of the books I skipped knowing that I haven't the faintest idea what will happen.

However, the jump was a little awkward in that it was a little like watching the original Rocky and then skipping to Rocky V without watching the slow degeneration of the series along the way. While I don't think the Wallander Series suffered the sort of fall Rocky suffered along the way, there did seem to be a degree of implausibility to the plot in Firewall that didn't exist in Faceless Killers. I wonder whether Mankell spent seven books upping the ante to the point where Firewall's narrative wouldn't have seemed so outlandish to someone who had read the entire series up to that point.

Furthermore, Firewall is not the sort of novel that could have aged well. Books that rely heavily on technology never do. It was published in 2002 and Mankell spends a lot of time explaining terms, such as "firewall", "server" and "code," that most of us understand, at least in principal, nowadays. Even if you aren't computer savvy, a reader in 2013 doesn't need a half page explanation about how banking transactions can be performed over the Internet. Naturally, Mankell could not have foreseen a world in which this would be common knowledge and nit-picking over a few dated references shouldn't dissuade anyone from reading this novel. But forewarned is forearmed.

But where the storytelling lapses into the realm of the dated or the implausible, the actual writing remains consistent to what a fan of Scandinavian Crime Fiction should expect. Ebba Segerberg's translation is hauntingly austere and completely lacking in idioms giving the novel a cold, stainless steel tone. As with Faceless Killers, Firewall reads like a veritable policing manual on how to (and sometimes how not to) run an investigation. Readers will enjoy the almost belabored way in which Mankell presents the facts of a case, dissects them and divides them, rethinks them and rehashes them and then does it again every time a new piece of information becomes available to the investigating team.

The constant reinterpretation of the facts is not only helpful to the reader but also in accordance to what a detective would do throughout an investigation. For all Firewall's implausibility, Mankell remains loyal to the spirit of policing in that he has written a consummate police force, but one that suffers from the same politics as real life forces. A police force that often stumbles and bumbles under pressure. A police force that is often understaffed and unappreciated. A police force that is populated by real people with real problems and real lives.

One might say that Mankell has written a wonderful novel about a typical police force, but this is the Scandinavia of the literary world. Mankell's typical police force is destined to clean up the world's most atypical crimes. And while Stockholm may weep, readers should rejoice.

But it's no wonder Wallander is consistently threatening to retire.

Faceless Killers

Faceless Killers

By Hennig Mankell

I have no idea where this book came from. It was on my shelf and looked short enough and interesting enough to wash my head clear of all the non-fiction I have been reading over the past couple of weeks. There's nothing like settling into a novel after a non-fiction binge. It's like coming home.

When I started the book I had absolutely no idea that it was yet another Swedish crime novel (these things are like bed bugs lately... just what you think you've seen the last one, out pops another from the seams of your coverlet). All I read on the back of the book were the words: "It was a senselessly violent crime," and I said: "SOLD!" I'm not a discerning customer. Anyway, I should have guessed it was Swedish.

As it turns out, Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell pre-dates the current fetish (um.. that's two blog posts in a row that I've used that term) with Scandinavian crime drama, but it does not pre-date the conventions. It is also the first in a series (dammit!). I don't know enough about Scandinavian crime dramas but based on the fact that this novel was an international best seller in 1991 and that it seems to have all the requisite insanity of The Millennium Trilogy (and others), I'm curious as to whether or not this is the grandfather of a genre (much like The New York Dolls were the grandfather of punk rock). Of course, it is set in a quiet provincial town. There is the unnecessarily gruesome murder, the overworked and under-appreciated cops, the over-arching distrust of foreigners, the ubiquitous dislike for women and the ever-impending snowstorms. It's all there. In 1991. I'm beginning to think that, much like Canadian fiction, there should be a checklist that should be created to decide exactly how Swedish a particular book is.

Faceless Killers starts with the (what else?) gruesome murder of an elderly couple on a farm outside a quiet, provincial town. Naturally, the wife suffers a fair amount more than her husband. The rest of the novel follows Kurt Wallander, an over-worked and under-appreciated cop leads the investigation of the killings. The first two thirds of the novel follow Wallander's life in a minute by minute account of the first two weeks of the investigation when it becomes apparent that the killers just might be refugees from Eastern Europe (which naturally sparks all sorts of reactionary hate crimes... this is Sweden after all, the land of Church burnings and Neo-Nazis). He attempts to move the investigation along while his personal life seems to be unravelling all around him. Only his calm and cool Ystad demeanor and the lack of snow seems to carry him through what to virtually everyone else living on the Skane would be a stress level of coronary proportions. Given that he is recently divorced (what cop isn't?) and eating nothing but hamburgers and pizza, I'm surprised that he lives through this episode, but what do I know about the Swedish constitution?

The last third of the novel seems to send the story into overdrive. Months pass in the span of a few pages as the case seems to go as cold as March in Hällesjö, before Wallander resolves the mystery in the final few pages. Given the detailed narrative of the first third, I found this shift in the momentum jarring. I had become accustom the minute by minute narrative style. When it started to spin out of control, Mankell lost me a bit. I started to care a lot less about the resolution due to the pace transition. It felt a little like Mankell was trying to wrap up his novel in time to catch the last train to Sävsjö or something. It all just seemed to lose traction.

But I could live with that. It was a minor nuisance in an otherwise enjoyable crime novel. What really irked me was the translation. I kept checking back to see whether Ernest Hemingway had returned from the grave to abbreviate an entirely new generation. Turns out it's a guy named Steven T. Murray. I'm assuming he really likes Hemingway, or Dick and Jane novels, either/or. It got to a point where I began talking to my wife in short, rapid-fire sentences over lunch. She asked whether or not I had suffered a stroke.

This is a typical (though written by me, not Henning Mankell) paragraph from the book:

Wallander wondered whether he should call Kalle in Väderstad. He felt sick. Ryberg still hadn't arrived. The winter wind blew outside his window. He remembered he hadn't eaten since yesterday. He walked out of the station. He entered the restaurant across the street. He ordered a pizza. He would call Kalle as soon as he got back to the office. The pizza had pineapple. It was 11:46pm.

See what I mean? It's as unnerving as a staring contest.

The other uncomfortable thing about Faceless Killers was its focus on Sweden's (apparent) liberal policy toward immigrants and refugees. While I wouldn't class this novel as being racist or anti-immigration, it did seem to imply a lot of negativity toward non-Swedish residents. While it could be that Mankell's intention was to raise the issue, I'm not sure he was overly clear about it. I got the impression that most of the characters in the book would have been perfectly happy with mass expulsion, but they were all too Nordically polite to say so. I might be wrong, but that was the impression this book left me.

But I'm not going to slag on Faceless Killers too much. As a whole it had me from page one through the pace change and while I lost some of the interest Mankell generated in his build-up I didn't lose so much as to throw the book down in disgust or anything. It's not the world's greatest crime novel  but it certainly isn't the worst book on the market and who am I to get all huffy about Swedish immigration policy? Besides, I could think of worse things to read if you happen to be caught on the overnight train from Stockholm to Rättviks.

If you dig sado-masochistic novels from Scandinavia, check it out. If you were ambivalent about the Millennium Trilogy, give this one a pass.