THE Swedish author, Henning Mankell, is one of the most notable crime writers today. He has gained bestseller stardom with his series of crime novels featuring inspector Kurt Wallander.
None of Mankell’s books feature perfect heroes. Mankell admits that what makes a character trustworthy is his ability to change: “Kurt Wallander is influenced and changes as a person. Through the different novels, he is not the same person; therefore he is himself, thus trustworthy. This makes me interested in the person. The true human being is the unfinished human being who is open, in the process of development and fragile. That means being alive.”
Mankell’s books have received major literary prizes and generated numerous international film and television adaptations. His latest novel, “Depths”, is not a typical murder mystery. Set in the Stockholm archipelago at the onset of the First World War, “Depths” is a character study of a naval engineer, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, who is both a compulsive liar and a serial murderer.
Mankell who now divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique where he works as a theater director explains that in the early 1990s, he rowed through the fog in the Gryt archipelago: “Later, when the weather had cleared up and everything seemed to recall a curious dream, this story was born”. This chilling portrait of a disturbed mind is set within the Baltic landscape Mankell knows so well. In this beautiful atmospheric novel, the chilling winds, the frozen water, and the mysterious fog are brilliantly evoked.
The author acknowledges that “Depths” is a story which takes place in a borderland between reality and his own invention. He has redrawn sea charts, given islands new names, added new bays and eliminated others. He has used real life characters but most of them have never been on the islands in the barren and desolate Ostergotland archipelago: “Nevertheless, I can imagine them, in the shadowy world where history and imagination merge, on the literary shores where the flotsam and jetsam of fantasy and reality intermingle,” he says.
Mankekll’s razor-sharp analysis of a murderer is set against the engineer’s bourgeois background. Lars is tormented by memories of childhood abuse and his inability to connect with other people: “His whole life was made up of distances... From the start, as far back as he could remember, solitude had been like his own skin.” The author attempts to explain what triggers those sadistic murders and why Lars kills without hesitation or regret.
Mankell’s interest in people dates from 1968 when at the age of twenty, he wrote and directed plays in collage form in order to “unmask society.” Since then, he has not ceased to play an active part in Sweden and Africa where he devotes much of his time to working with AIDS charities. In 2001 he set up a new publishing house Leopard. His aim is to mirror social changes through the publications; he sees novels as an unsurpassed form to understand people. Mankell admits, “The fundamental driving force for me is to, with poor ability, create a change in the world we live in. It becomes worse and worse on every level. It is about exploitation, plundering and degrading. I have a small possibility to participate in the resistance. Most of the things that I do are part of a resistance, a form of solidarity work. I wish that I could do more of value and that the world would change into a place of decency.”
“Depths” is not only a well written novel but it is also an opportunity to discover one of the most talented contemporary crime writers. In this in-depth analysis of a criminal’s intimate thoughts set against the bleak Baltic landscape, Henning Mankell creates a haunting and mysterious atmosphere which grips the reader’s attention from the first page to the last.