Customer Reviews

Depths

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This is pure Henning Mankell. This is unlike any Henning Mankell you have ever read.
I am a huge Mankell fan, but am wary of non-Wallander Mankell. I didn't like the long non-Wallander sections of the White Lioness and was just moderately impressed with the Return of the Dancing Master.
So I stepped into Depths cautiously but was soon blown away. This is a remarkable novel that has a depth to it greater than any of the Wallander novels. It is, in part, a character study, a love story (perverse at that), a gothic novel, a thriller, and almost a horror novel.
Without giving too much away, this is a story about a sailor in the Swedish navy around 1915. He is married, but meets a woman on a remote island. Things get complicated. Very complicated. The protagonist is one of the more reprehensible characters I've ever read, and yet the incredible, harrowing ending made me sympathetic for him. Never before has Mankell so masterfully placed characters in tough situations and lead the reader through such sharp narrative twists and turns.
The sea features heavily in the novel and reminded me more, in many ways, of a Joseph Conrad novel than one of Mankell's crime novels, the depth of character and narrative reminds me of Ian McEwan. This is not a police procedural, but it is very thrilling. It's a novel about the frailty of the human heart, about making wrong choices, about hope and pain. It's pure literature and not only one of Mankell's best novels, but one of the best novels I've read in many, many years.

The novel opens with the harrowing scene of a woman called Kristina Tacker as she escapes from a psychiatric asylum. She vaguely remembers that her husband had the rank of Commander in the Swedish army and that he was a hydrographical survey engineer. At this moment, in 1937, Kristina Tacker is fifty-seven and it is twelve years since she has uttered her last word.
The reader is immediately drawn into the suspense created by this opening as he follows the story of the main character, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a man obsessed by the depths of the sea and torn between two women, Sara Frederika and his wife Kristina Tacker. We follow his destiny at the beginning of World War I as he slowly loses his grip on his surroundings and becomes entangled in a web of lies and crimes which inexorably leads to his downfall. He ends up by living in a world entirely created by lies. Indeed he becomes an impostor; an impostor lives a life but the deceit involved lives a different life. It is the tragic fate of a man whose life has always been based on lunatic ideas and who has built his existence on distances and depths instead of seeking closeness.

A number of reviewers here were disappointed with this novel because of its relentless bleakness. The "Depths", by Henning Mankell, is bleak indeed, but it is not a story badly written. Some objected to "very short chapters", this of course is a valid stylistic exercise used by other authors, usually to make a point; it is used by Mankell to the same effect here (the protagonist was obsessed with the detail but unable to see the whole and this can be seen as one of the reason of his descent into depths, both literally and figuratively).

The bleakness of the novel is masterfully executed; if you would rather read something uplifting this is not the book to pick up! The characters are well supported by the relentless land- and seascape (much of the story is set in the cold season, and most of the summertime is glossed over). But this novel belongs in the European tradition of Ibsen or Dostoyevsky with its dispassionate analysis of a character whose life unravels in front of our very eyes and where practically everyone affected by his actions ends up damaged as well. The strong female characters grow in strength through the story but still remain only schematically, or lightly, drawn in contrast to the centre character. This was the only disappointment for me; otherwise the story made a powerfull impact on me.

Henning Mankell uses a distinctly different writing style in his latest translated novel "Depths", compared to his hugely popular Kurt Wallander series. Rather than using the descriptive style prevalent in his police procedurals, "Depths" is written concisely with a proponderence of chapters typified by their brevity. Whereas most of his previous offerings are presented in a largely somber manner, "Depths" is a downright depressing novel.

Mankell's novel commences with a woman, Kristina Tacker having escaped from a mental institution. He goes on to describe the circumstances that put her in her present predicament. Her husband, main character Lars Tobiasson-Svartman was a Swedish naval commander and venerable hydrographic engineer. At the onset of World War One he was commissioned to sound the depths of navigable waterways around the Stockholm archipelago, to update sea charts. This would allow safer and more rapid transit of Swedish ships during the tumultuous wartimes.

Svartman while on his secret mission discovers a woman living by herself on a small rocky island of Halsskar and becomes obsessed with her. He formulates a series of lies and deceptions to his wife, comrades and superiors that are fabricated to enable him to shirk his duties as both a commander and a husband to be with this woman, Sara Fredricka.

Gradually his whole essence sinks to the level of depravity as lies lead to violence and murder. While his pregnant wife sits in their Stockholm flat convinced that Svartman is on a clandestine mission, he is leading a double life on Halsskar.

Eventually he sinks into an abyss from which he cannot extricate himself as "Depths" plays out like a Swedish Shakespearean tragedy. All that the deplorable Svartman touches becomes marked for catastrophe.

In the Wallander series, Mankell's protagonist is empathetic whereas main character Lars Svartman evolves into a villainous blackguard for whom there can by no sympathy or acceptance.

This was my very first Mankell-book, and I loved it. I just finished it yesterday, and now I am searching for something that is just as good. Any suggestions?

But as for the review: There was initially something about the language of this book that just really swept me away, much like an underwater stream would slowly but surely sweep you further away from land. It was the short sentences, the sometimes very short chapters, the feeling that only the very most necessary information was shared with the reader - what then, about all the information that wasn't shared? I simply had to keep going and keep going.

I will admit that around Part 2 of the book, things became a bit more 'boring' (or slow, perhaps). It felt a bit more like a stand-still from the rest of the book, yet after he meets this woman on this deserted skerry, the story really picks up.

I was early on puzzled by the main characters use of names. For instance: His full name was Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, and he insisted on being referred to Tobiasson-Svartman at all times. Flames of fury would burn in him should someone accidentally just call him Svartman. The same with is wife; he always referred to her as Kristina Tacker. Not once, even in his thoughts, did he allow himself to just say Kristina. This was naturally also the case with the woman on the skerry; Sara Fredrika. Not just Sara, nor just Fredrika. Oh no. Sara Fredrika. He is a man of great control. He finds comfort in the fact that he has full control of his objective surroundings. He knows the depth of every part of the nearby ocean. That is his job: to measure ocean depths, and he does his job with great pride. Yet, as the reader will find out, while trying desperately to hold on to every ounce of control even of the more subjective sides of life, mainly his own and others' emotions, he sinks. Deeper and deeper. Into an abyss that seemingly has no bottom.

He is offered plenty of opportunities to save himself. To correct his wrongs. But that would be to admit defeat. And by refusing to admit defeat, defeat eventually begins to stalk him, like a wolf after its prey, hiding in the shaddows, waiting to strike. How long can he really hide from it? How long can he escape?

This is by no means a feel-good book. If you're in the mood for something dark and mysterious however, this is an excellent book to enjoy.

Yet another dark, Scandinavian novel here; this one set in the wilds of the WWI Baltic Sea. The plot, such as is it, follows hydrographer Lars whose declared intention is to find a depth that can't be plumbed, through a liminal world of shifting seas and conflicting tides into a world of madness. But it's not so much the character Lars on which one focuses, or the two women in his life, but the liminal seascape/dreamscape of the world he inhabits. About fifty pages into the over 400 page novel, I began to ask myself what was dream and what was waking cognition here. For Lars, as he spirals into greater depths, greater confusions, "It seemed to him that he was living in many different worlds at the same time. Each one of them was equally true."

Ultimately, this book is quite disturbing and brings to the surface, as it were, several philosophical questions, such as this one contemplated by Plato and Plotinus:

"`Children would no doubt like to choose their parents,' she said. `Maybe they do, did we but know it.'"

Eventually, in these wild Baltic waters, all waking, human cognition dissolves, all the artificial constructs we create in order to identify loved ones, to name them, to fix them in place - loved ones who, after all, are in the constant process of changing into someone else - sink into the unknown. As Lars's wife says, on the verge of clinical madness:

"I have realised that I am married to a man who doesn't exist, a shadow with a circulatory system and a brain that is nothing more than an invention, a figment of the imagination."

I'm only giving the book 4 starts because the staccato minimalist prose is a bit off-putting for my taste. But this book is still one to be recommended by all serious readers who realise that, in the vast deeps of this cosmos, we may well be nothing more than shadows with circulatory systems who briefly haunt it.

I've read a half dozen Mankell books, this being the second one without Wallander or a mystery. Depths is the best book by Mankell by far! While his other books are engaging, I always lose interest in the last 25%. Not with Depths - it has 10 parts and each part finishes with a crazy twist. I was engrossed until the very end. Great book!

I think of films, not novels, when trying to describe DEPTHS: It's part Ingmar Bergman, part Alfred Hitchcock --- masters of the symbolic, the noir-ish and the macabre --- with maybe a dash of Ripley's Game thrown in. However, Ripley --- in the film and the Patricia Highsmith novel on which it's based --- is clearly a psychopath; the suspense is in seeing how long and how successfully he can pass for normal. In contrast, the protagonist of DEPTHS, a naval officer by the name of Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, initially appears sane, albeit terrifically repressed.

Sure, he has issues: a father complex (Tobiasson is his mother's name, inserted for protective purposes: "His father was dead now, but dead people can also be a threat"); a highly ritualized marriage to Kristina Tacker, a woman who mysteriously has retained her maiden name; and seriously weird dreams (horses being whipped?), but he seems more control freak than madman.

When we first encounter him, it is wartime, 1914, and he is engaged in a covert mission to the Baltic Sea --- charting the depths of certain sea routes used by the Swedish navy to make sure ships won't run aground. His profession has to do with measurement, and he seems to conduct his life and manage his psyche with the same pitiless precision. Then disturbing things start happening. A seaman falls ill with appendicitis and dies before he can reach a hospital; the body of a German soldier is found floating in the ocean (although Sweden has remained neutral, Russian and German ships are battling not far away); and a captain drops dead of a heart attack.

Most fatally, Tobiasson-Svartman rows to Halsskär, an obscure and apparently unoccupied island near his ship's anchorage, and there he discovers a young woman named Sara Fredrika --- a widow living in unimaginable isolation --- and conceives a desperate passion for her. Sara Fredrika is completely unlike Kristina Tacker, with her cool beauty and fragile china animals (the two women are clearly conceived as opposites). She is dirty and smells; in her primitivism she is irresistible.

Tobiasson-Svartman is hooked. He returns home to Stockholm, where his wife tells him she is pregnant, but he cannot stay away from Halsskär and Sara Fredrika. In his desperation to return to the island undetected, he even walks over the frozen sea (like many scenes in DEPTHS, this journey is strikingly and memorably cinematic). Helpless in his obsession, he squanders his savings, deceives his wife and employer, and finally commits murder; as his double life unravels, we begin to see that he is not just the victim of an inappropriate lust --- he is quite insane. It all ends just about as badly as one can imagine.

The wildness of this gothic tale is echoed in the oceanic setting --- more than a setting, actually, for in Tobiasson-Svartman's fevered mind nature is treacherously alive (rocks turning into beasts; the sea "keeping watch on him, like a sharp-eyed animal"), and Mankell is constantly making parallels between the unconscious mind and the fathomless sea ("He was mapping navigable channels so that other people would be able to travel in safety, but the charts he was mapping for himself led to chaos." And again: "He had measured the depth of the sea...but he had not succeeded in coordinating his discoveries with the navigable channels inside himself.").

I must confess that this relentless, heavy-handed symbolism got me down after a while (as did the oddly brief chapters, some as short as a single sentence). Perhaps it is a European style of novel that doesn't appeal to me, or maybe the fault of any literature in translation, but despite its haunting seascape the book seemed to me pretentious and arty rather than profound.

It's not that I insist on Mankell sticking to the known territory of his mystery novels. He is allowed to experiment. But here, it seems to me, his usually sure touch has deserted him. In his thrillers, as in DEPTHS, the realm of the abnormal and disturbing (in the form of murder) is juxtaposed with matter-of-fact life and daily routine. But Mankell's finest creation, the police inspector Wallander --- instead of being consumed by the craziness of his job --- remains magnificently human and absolutely sane. He is flawed, vulnerable, overweight, lonely, sometimes depressed, not that good at being a parent, husband or lover --- but he is magnificent at solving murders.

I wish Mankell had dispatched Wallander on his own secret mission to save DEPTHS from turning into a chilly intellectual conceit. With him tracking Tobiasson-Svartman, the book might have had a pulse.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

It can be difficult when your favorite author (Mankell) leaves off writing about your favorite character (Kurt Wallender) but in The Depths, Mankell makes the leap of faith worthwhile, even exhilarating.

This is an amazing book by an amazing writer who continues to develop his craft with fearless forays into the unknown when he could quite successfully remain with his tried and true Wallender. Wallender is so popular that a series starring Kenneth Brannagh has been developed for television. I can only suppose that Mankell's exploration of the middle aged male archetype through the Wallender character has reached a standstill and, since Mankell MUST continue to explore this psyche, he requires a different genre and venue in which to do so. Hurray for Mankell. It is working. We too can now explore deeper into our own psyches thanks to this exceptional story that reveals the naked face of the secret heart as it struggles to learn who it is.

The depth of emotionalism that pervades The Depths is breathtaking. Just relax into the hands of the master and enjoy the intellectual and the surprisingly sensual ride!

It is October, 1914. The Great War between Germany and Britain has just begun. German and Russian warships have been spotted off the coast of Sweden by fishermen. Lars Tobiasson-Svartman boards the Swedish destroyer SVEA on a secret mission to measure the depths of the naval channels that approach Stockholm in the event that neutral Sweden becomes involved in the war. His mission is urgent and vital as the submarine now presents a danger that could potentially reach Stockholm undetected. Sweden is in a state of fear and uncertainty; wanting to "switch off all their lighthouses and creep down into our burrows". But they cannot.

Tobiasson-Svartman is a hydrographic engineer, not a military man, although he is given the rank of Commander for this mission. Tobiasson-Svartman is....well....... complicated. His wife, Kristina, feels more comfortable being naked in front of him than of crying in front of him and dotes on him like a mother in their apartment, filled with crystal figurines, in Gothenburg. He says he loves her but that he doesn't know what love is. He seldom laughs and constantly wonders if he has been made of "faulty clay".

This mission fulfills one of his greatest dreams. Years before, as a younger man, he charted the depths of these channels but now the urgency is real. This validates and justifies Tobiasson-Svartman's idiosyncratic and analytical nature and choice of career. But nothing yet in his experience has validated him as a man. What he anticipates even more than the task to come is the journey of discovery into something entirely more personal; discovering the greatest depth of all, his knowledge of his own nature.

Tobiasson-Svartman is soon transferred to the gunboat BLINDA where he is given the Captain's cabin. He conceals his nervousness by appearing strict and angry. Insecurity is the prevalent theme of his life. He cautiously observes and acts like he thinks he should while he measures himself against "real men", Captain Rake and Lt. Jakobsson. His genuine but secret surprise at being accorded acceptance and respect on board ship reflects a visceral, almost adolescent insecurity. His lack of genuine intimacy with his wife; his self imposed emotional distancing from his now dead father; his peeping tom behavior with a woman he discovers living on a rocky island and his subsequent sexual fascination with her- all portray an adolescent or young male without a formed identity and yet suffused with a deep intellect, purpose and a gripping need for sexual exploration. Tobiasson-Svartman feels like a phony or at best, invalidated as a man. He is not a freak but represents the fearful hollowness of many grown people, men and women, who find themselves grown up but subjected to unrelenting insecurity due to their lack of self knowledge. This is a result of Tobiasson-Svartman's family of origin and made worse by his high intellect and exacting analytical nature. He fears yet desires to find his own depth. This is the true essence of The Depths.

Unfortunately, what Tobiasson-Svartman discovers in this wild and uncensored environment; newly bestowed with an authority that he has not had time or experience to own; the exploration of his own depths will take him beyond his capacity to cope and lead to his own self-destruction and severe consequences for his wife and the object of his desire, the wild woman living alone in the Swedish archipelago.

This novel exudes atmosphere; from the rugged, wild coastline of the country; the anxiety and electrical energy of a people on the periphery of a world war; the graphic description of the playing out of one's basic nature in a wild environment that evokes the energy and dedication of a rural youth playing outside in the wilderness. This is a story unlike anything I have ever read and it is very highly recommended.

I read this Mankell several years ago and found it to be very good. The tale is believable, centering on the 'coming out' of a sort of peeping Tom quasi psychopath who suffered under his father. It's not a Wallender mystery, and it isn't a great book but it's a very good one. One also gets the right picture of the Baltic Sea, it's not very deep!


If you haven't read Firewall and Return of the Dancing Master, then do. I don't recall if I reviewed them but they're exceptional among the Mankell (and all) mystery books.

This review was based on the original Swedish 'Djup', the only Mankell I've struggled through in the original language (the Norwegian translations are certainly no worse than second best, and the German translations are also very good).