Faceless Killers (1991)
We mystery fans of a certain age have all read the Martin Beck police procedurals of the husband and wife team, Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall. But the last of them was published in 1975 and the series now appears in the Black Lizard/Vintage Crime series. It's unlikely anyone's read many Swedish mysteries since. They've an heir now though in the form of Henning Mankell and his slovenly but stolid hero, Inspector Kurt Wallander. Where Wahloo and Sjowall used the Beck series to critique the welfare state of the 60s and 70s from a more radical Left perspective, Wallander's perspective is more conservative and the Sweden he patrols is a place that seems to be on the verge of the abyss because of the "successes" of socialism. It's both dependent on immigrants to fill the jobs that there are no young Swedes to do and deeply resentful of the fact that the newcomers aren't being assimilated, though no one shows the slightest interest in making the effort that such assimilation would require. It's a society where folks seem to have pretty much quit trying:
We're living as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. [...] But those days have irretrievably vanished, and it's questionable whether they were ever as idyllic as we remember them.Or, as Mr. Mankell puts it elsewhere:
Sweden had turned into a country where people more than anything else seemed to be afraid of being bothered.Predictably, the conditions in such a nation are rather distressing and Wallander -- estranged from his wife, daughter, father and friends; overweight; alcoholic; and so on and so forth -- is thoroughly distressed.
The case he's on concerns the especially brutal torture and murder of an elderly farm couple. The only clues are the unusual ligature on a rope used in the crime and the wife's dying whisper that their attackers were "foreign." This puts the police and various nationalist groups on the track of the local foreign worker population. Wallander soon finds himself spending as much time dealing with attacks by racists as with the initial crime and Mr. Mankell uses the scenario as a way to explain both Wallander's own frustration with an immigration system that's obviously badly broken and as a warning about the escalating tensions and the hatreds of folk less level-headed than the detective.
Had the author known how successful the series was going to be he might have slowed the pace of the changes that Wallander undergoes in the course of the novel. He crashes, burns, and rises so quickly as to disorient the reader a bit and the crime is solved at so stately a pace that the contrast is even more jarring. But the detective is a sympathetic character and the observations about Sweden, in particular, and Europe, generally, will be eye-opening for many Americans. The cultural backdrop against which the story is set is just as bleak and barren as the wintry landscape. Read it and fear for the future of Europe.
(Reviewed:25-Sep-05)
Grade: (B+)
