154 of 166 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
"Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.", February 16, 2010
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Although this quotation of Chairman Mao's is not to be found in Henning Mankell's The Man from Beijing the book is filled with politics and bloodshed.
I've enjoyed Henning Mankell's Inspector Kurt Wallander series and have read most of the books in that series. With that in mind, I turned to Mankell's newest book The Man from Beijing with great interest. This is a stand-alone book not connected with the series. The Man from Beijing was well worth reading even if didn't quite live up to my admittedly high expectations.
High Points
Mankell has put together an entertaining plot. Nineteen people have been brutally murdered in a remote village in Sweden. The opening scenes are set out in terse matter-of-fact manner that accentuates the horrors being described. It soon becomes apparent to Birgitta Roslin, a middle-aged judge in the city of Helsingborg, that she has ancestral ties to the village. Slowly but surely Roslin becomes ensnared in the subsequent investigation of the crime. The story moves across the world from Sweden to China, to Africa and then back to Sweden. Mankell does a very good job keeping the story line moving forward. His writing style is well-suited to this type of story. He is not effusive and he does not waste words. He sets a scene well and I found it hard to put the book down.
In both his Inspector Wallander series and in The Man from Beijing Mankell does a terrific job in placing a story in the context of the world around us. He does not write within the bubble of a genre but writes as if the story really is taking place in the world outside. As I read the chapters set in China and Africa, I got the feeling that in this regard Mankell shares some literary DNA with John le Carre, particularly le Carre's later works. Their writing styles differ but their insinuation of the `real world' into the stories each resonate the same way with me.
Low Point
One of the strongest points of the Inspector Wallander series for me was the fact that Wallander and his team rely on hard work, perseverance and more hard work in the pursuit of a solution to a crime or series of crime. Luck plays a hand some times but there are no flashes of Sherlock Holmes-like genius and there are no miraculous plot contrivances that get the story resolved. That was not the case in The Man from Beijing. I am always ready to suspend disbelief to a good degree when I read a piece of fiction. However, in this case I felt there were times when my suspension of disbelief was stretched to a breaking point. For me there where just one too many `coincidences' that had to be introduced to get from part A to part B and Part C of the plot.
Conclusion
The problems with the plot devices were, in my opinion, outweighed by the interesting plot and Mankell's ability to weave current social and economic and political developments in Asia and Africa seamlessly into the story.
Recommended. L. Fleisig
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55 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Five stars for the first couple hundred pages... but then???, February 17, 2010
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This stand-alone novel from the acclaimed Swedish creator of the popular Wallander detective novels (that have also been filmed in an excellent series starring Kenneth Branagh) tells the tale of a horrific crime, a truly fiendish and frightening killer and a middle-aged judge who believes the police have it all wrong and sets out to solve it on her own. The writing is crisp and well paced and downright riveting for the first two-thirds of the book, although one does tend to wonder a bit about all the coincidences it takes to keep things moving along.
Then, at around a hundred or so pages from the end, the story suddenly veers off into an examination of the politics, conflicts and corruption connected to China's rise to superpower status. A long side trip into Africa--which it appears China is trying to turn into a satellite continent where it can dump its poor and potentially rebellious peasants and ensure there'll never be another Tiananmen Square, and where we're also given to believe that Zimbabwe's dictator Mugabe is nowhere near as bad a bad guy as we in the west have been led to believe--becomes a long and largely disruptive diversion from the main story.
By the time the author shifts gears again and gets back to Sweden and the crime at the heart of his novel, the story has gotten so far off course that it just sort of flounders its way to an unsatisfying ending, with way too many strings left loose. 3.5 stars.
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112 of 130 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
None More Bleak, February 7, 2010
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You can understand how Sweden has above-average rates for alcoholism and suicide, if Henning Mankell's book descriptions are typical of the country. Most of the time his scenery is covered in snow, cold and drear. Urban scenes have relentless sodium-vapor lighting, and he rarely remarks on how beautiful the country can be.
Obviously, he deals with crime, and you can't be sentimental, especially in this case, where there are nineteen dead bodies, brutally killed, in a hamlet of old people. The description is clearly expressed, with little place for any emotions. It seems that the killer had intended for the victims to die in painful ways, often in front of each other.
While the local police struggle to find clues or a motive, the case attracts the attention of Birgitta Roslin, a district judge in the city of Helsingborg, who realizes that she is distantly related to some of the victims. She visits the scene of the crime and runs across the attention of the local police, who are understandably unwilling to let someone, even a judge, dig around the hamlet. What Birgitta does find is a diary kept in a drawer, written in the mid- to late-eighteen hundreds, by one of her ancestors who went to the U.S.A. to be in charge of the Chinese workers building the transcontinental railroad.
From this Birgitta realizes that the motive for the murders may have come from the descendants of the Chinese workers to avenge the way they were treated. We read the story of two of them and their mistreatment by Jan Andren who ruled the Chinese with a rod of iron and was known as Mr. JA. One of the Chinese develops a hatred for Mr. JA and swears that he will "Kill that man when the time is right." In the meantime they are forced to work on the railroad track in the snow-covered mountains.
Birgitta does some Internet research and finds out that an American branch of the Andren family has been killed in the same way as the Swedish victims. She's about to point that out to the local police when they announce that they have a person who's confessed to the killings - a Swede. Birgitta realizes that she'll have to solve the crime on her own, and here the book takes off into a total of four continents and a hundred and thirty years.
Henning's prose is grim, as you'd expect from his other books. Although this starts off in the police procedural style of his earlier work, it turns into a thriller, and it's hard to stop turning the pages, even though the action calms down from time to time. Unless you only want more in the flavor of the Kurt Wallander mysteries, Henning's skill will carry you along. The detail and believability of his characters and action is magnificent.
What's not to like? Very little. You end up disliking just about every character, and even the heroine has an unhappy marriage. Sometimes I had trouble remembering who was who with the Chinese names, and it took a while for the book to turn into the international thriller it is. Of course, no-one who has any experience with Mankell novels expects The Sound of Music, and a growing number of people are discovering his work and becoming very impressed with it.
So if you're familiar with Henning Mankell's other books, you'll like what you find here. I suspect that many people new to this writer will enjoy the book as well, and Stieg Larsson's success with Swedish mysteries will open up the audience for this book. If you like Larsson, you'll like Mankell.
So do yourself a favor and get it. And if you live in and are depressed by Sweden, do what Mankell did and move to Mozambique.
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