At the end of “The Troubled Man,” Henning Mankell needs only six short lines of narrative to pull the plug on his enormously popular series of Kurt Wallander detective novels. Mr. Mankell doesn’t do this delicately. “After that there is nothing more,” the swan song reads in part. “The story of Kurt Wallander is finished, once and for all.” As an irritable kiss-off to his readers this couldn’t be any more abrupt.
Henning Mankell
The Wallander career needn’t have ended this way. On other occasions when famous characters and series are bid adieu, their creators may contrive a cliffhanger, an actual tumble (à la Sherlock Holmes, Professor Moriarty and Reichenbach Falls in Conan Doyle’s “Final Problem”) or a moment of passionate and intense surprise (à la Ian Rankin’s John Rebus in “Exit Music”). No matter how eager these authors were to extricate themselves, they were able to retire well-loved characters suspensefully, without sounding fed up and bored.
But Mr. Mankell isn’t one to worry about niceties. His brusque, gloomy Swedish police inspector can be downbeat even by the standards of Sweden, where the bar for brooding is already set so high. And in “The Troubled Man,” Wallander has a whole new set of problems to worry about. He is preoccupied not only with the crime story around which “The Troubled Man” revolves but also with his diminished prospects and deteriorating state of mind.
Wallander’s morbidity does help to make “The Troubled Man” a successful stand-alone book. That’s because it makes him remember old events and recapitulate them. Even readers who are not up to speed on the nine official Kurt Wallander novels that have preceded it will find much evidence of his history in the new book. Family members, old cases, the women in his life: they all come back to haunt him in “The Troubled Man.” And just as the past becomes more vivid for him, the present grows ever more threatening.
Much is made by both Wallander and Mr. Mankell of the fact that Wallander has turned 60. He faces deteriorating health, increasingly frightening lapses of memory, loneliness and the prospect of a bleak, empty future. To belabor the point, Mr. Mankell writes of Wallander’s feeling “as if he were turning into an hourglass with the sand silently running out.”
Then there’s “a darkness in which he could find no lamps to light.” And the terrible questions: “Was he already getting close to his devastating dotage, when he would become increasingly helpless?” On one typically wretched night he talks to himself aloud, saying, “Kurt Wallander is lying in his bed, thinking of death.”
Fortunately Mr. Mankell gives Wallander a few things to live for. The best of them is his new granddaughter, Klara, born during the course of this book to Wallander’s unmarried daughter, Linda (who is also on a police force), and Hans von Enke, a financier. Klara gives Wallander common ground with his longtime colleagues, who by now are doting grandfathers themselves. She also connects him to a mystery involving Hans’s parents, Swedish submarines, Russian espionage and (in the role of the Great Satan) the United States.
Hans’s father, Haken von Enke, is the troubled man of the title, even if Wallander can go toe to toe with him when it comes to worrying. In any case Haken has a 75th birthday party in Stockholm to which Wallander is invited. During the course of the party Haken confides in Wallander about some of what he witnessed as a naval officer in the 1980s, when foreign submarines had a distressing way of showing up in Swedish waters. Before Wallander has had a chance to ponder these revelations, Haken does something shocking. He disappears.
This isn’t a police case for Wallander. But how can he resist it? Soon he is investigating the secretive life of Klara’s other grandfather, the man who was supposed to be his future in-law. Hakan’s friends, colleagues and wife, Louise, all seem mystified about why he would vanish. But Wallander keeps pushing doggedly into Hakan’s past, using his vacation time to venture away from his quiet home in Ystad and do some sleuthing.
Then another of the book’s characters becomes an apparent victim of foul play, and an important figure in Hakan’s story appears almost out of nowhere. Thus prompted by a string of jolts, Wallander goes into his phlegmatic version of high gear.
But the mysteries of “The Troubled Man” are not what make it compelling. And they are never entirely resolved. The book’s gruff remark that the missing can take their secrets with them becomes Mr. Mankell’s excuse for leaving a lot of loose ends messily untied. But this novel’s main interest isn’t really the disappearance of Hakan von Enke. The disintegration of Wallander is its primary concern.
The methodical Mr. Mankell (via his stiff translator, Laurie Thompson) strews this book with danger signs about Wallander’s well-being. We learn a lot about his health problems (diabetes, memory loss) and his health habits (not great). The story follows him through some alarming lapses, like his taking his gun to a restaurant while off duty and then forgetting to bring it home. And the other characters who serve as points of reference, like Wallander’s alcoholic ex-wife and mortally ill ex-lover, only heighten his fear of infirmity. It hardly helps when Linda persuades him to buy a dark suit so he can wear it to funerals.
Late in the book Wallander shakes off his torpor and leaps into the business of mystery solving. He’s still good at it. It’s an antidote to his secret terror. And it gives Mr. Mankell one last chance to show how Wallander’s doggedness, acuity and fierce dedication to justice have kept this character and his exploits alive.
© 2011nytimes.com
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