Customer Reviews

The Man from Beijing

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(36)
2 star:		(41)
1 star:		(44)

 

 

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

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.

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.

I found the extremely long tedious chapters on China overdone gratuitous and clumsy not well integrated into the main plot which gets lost in detailed exposition of Chinas political history. Due to these structural flaws I lost way and gave up. Much checking back and forth to locate the twist and or turn in plot but to no avail. I gave up. In the past Mankell books I have run into slow parts usually due tothe writers reflective ruminative nature but this detailed history set off by itself was a barrier I was unable to cross.

Although I'm always will to suspend disbelief for a good mystery, the plot of the The Man from Beijing was so nonsensical I found suspension impossible. The main character goes blundering around for no real reason other than to further the plot. She stumbles over coincidence after coincidence while waxing nostaligc about wanting to join the Red Guard in the 60's.

The reason for the book's horrific murders is weak at best. And the information about China is not always correct. The Chinese were not melting forks in backyard smelters during the Great Leap Forward. They don't use forks.

Having read happily through Henning Mankell's previous books, I was thoroughly disappointed, even irritated, by "The Man From Beijing." This book has harnessed plot in the service of political diatribe--the digressions are much more substantial than the actual story. Most of the political lecture is pretty boring and, what's worse, much of it is hard to swallow. This is true in particular of the pages of praise for Robert Mugabe. Who is Mr. Mankell kidding? It's hard to know whether anything in this book, even descriptions of the Swedish court system, are remotely realistic. Political prejudice lurks behind every word when it's not right out in the open.

I am sorry I bought this book, sorrier that I read it, and very unlikely to read another of his books.

Anyone who bought The Man From Beijing on the strength of the author's earlier books, as I did, is likely to be sorely disappointed. This surely is his worst book, certainly of those I've read and mostly appreciated.

The story centers on the slaughter of three closely related families in a remote village in Sweden, the crime ordered up by a wealthy Beijing businessman intent on revenging the cruelties inflicted upon a mid nineteenth century ancestor by one of the Swedish families' ancestors of the same era. That this strains credibility is basically not the problem, for its's no more implausible than the plot lines of many of Mankell's earlier books or of those of authors of the same genre. It's the way Mankell puts flesh on this skeleton, with cliche heaped upon cliche, with stereotypes galore, and with long winded discourses on Chinese history and politics, all recounted at an intellectual level worthy of a fifth grader. The steets of Beijing, we are informed, are jammed with cars and the air fouled by pollution triple or quadruple that of New York and Paris. The Chinese are inscrutable, speak in riddles and are mostly corrupt, although alongside the bad bad businessman who ordered the killings there is also his very good and idealistic sister. China is planning to ship its excess population off to Africa, which we learn is hot and its people impoverished. At every stop along the way the reader is offered a travelogue.

To sort all this out Mankell enlists a middle aged Swedish judge who is going through her own life crisis but he throws in so much fluff that through hundreds of pages only a rare few are there to grip the reader's attention.

To be read late at night, if at all, and guaranteed to induce deep sleep

Henning Mankell is an excellent writer of detective stories. His Kurt Wallender stories are superb, but here he tries to do too much. It's a detective story - kind of - along with a story of the Chinese building the Central Pacific Railway in 1863, plus some observations on Mao's Cultural Revolution of the 1960-70s plus a thriller ending that really doesn't belong; and the combination just doesn't work. Mr. Mankell should go back to Kurt Wallender and leave thrillers to Jack Higgins and Frederick Forsyth and Tom Clancy - and history to the historians.

There's nothing wrong with the start. One winter day all the occupants of a small Swedish village are found badly butchered - all of them. (Side note: I couldn't locate any of the towns mentioned in my National Geographical Atlas.) There are no suspects, but a middle aged Swedish judge - Birgitta Roslyn - is distantly related to the occupants of one household and, intrigued with the police investigation. she and pretty much starts a one woman off the record and behind the door investigation on her own. And she's pretty good at it. So far, so good. Mankell is on track.

Suddenly, however, we are told a second story. It's 1863 and San, a 20 year old Chinese peasant, is kidnapped by the Chinese mafia and roped to a gang of Chinese slave laborers tunneling through the Sierras for the Central Pacific in the winter. Surviving incredible hardships (emphasis on the word incredible) he makes it back to China where we leave him. (However, we know he had a cruel Swedish foreman.)

Then we return to the present. Birgitta is on leave from her judicial duties because of stress but is able to continue he investigation, which is leading to a result contrary to that which the police have just concluded. Her investigation leads to a man from China who spent one night - the night of the murders - in a hotel in the small town in question. And she has a picture of him. Still so far so good - a detective story. But now the story starts to go off the rails.

One of her friend is going o China for a conference and Birgitta, still under stress, decides to go along. Before long she's shadowed, attacked, threatened and scared. And we're never sure exactly who is who or where is where. Frankly I defy the ordinary reader to keep track of, much less follow, the next literary meanderings, of all the sinister events which are interspersed with little essays having nothing to do with the story - Mankell on Mao, Mankell on history, Mankell on China etc.

Okay, we've gone from little towns in Sweden in winter to The Sierras in winter, then to China in winter and now we go to Zimbabwe in "summer" where the Chinese are seeking to colonize a large part of this beautiful country to relieve population pressures; and now we have a lot of Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, Tom Clancy action which I could have done without. And we also have so far as I know the only bit of literature in existence which has had anything nice to say about Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. (Note: Mankell lives most of he time in Maputo, fight across the border in Mozambique.) Finally there is an ending. We know who did it and why, And Birgitta is going back to the bench. And her stress problem? We just don't know. But if you read the book maybe you can figure it out.

Henning Mankell is best known for having created fictional detective Kurt Wallander, a character I am familiar with via a couple of BBC adaptations of Mankell's work. Wallander is typical of the genre, I suppose. He is another of those broken down, older detectives whose personal life is in ruins but who gamely carries on with catching the local bad guys. It is all very dark and moody, but I almost always take to that type of atmosphere and character and that is what I expected to get from The Man from Beijing.

And, at first, that is what I got. The story opens at the scene of a spectacular mass murder in one of Sweden's most isolated little villages. All but three of the village's twenty-two inhabitants have been brutally slaughtered in just a few hours and police are struggling to identify either a motive for the murders or a suspect. When Judge Birgitta Roslin, who is on a two-week medical leave from the bench, realizes that this is the same village her mother was raised in, she decides to go there for a personal look. Once there, and sensing that the police investigation is headed in the wrong direction, Roslin begins her own - an investigation that leads her to believe that a Chinese assassin is responsible for the deaths.

Butting heads with the local police, however, proves to be rather fruitless, so Roslin continues to nose around on her own. Her amateur investigation brings her all the way to China where her efforts attract the attention of the wrong people. Just happy to escape Beijing in one piece, Roslin returns to Sweden only to find that her Chinese troubles have followed her home.

Henning Mankell had the makings of a snappy crime thriller on his hands if he had only stuck with this basic plot and characters. Even the long flashback dealing with San, a Chinaman kidnapped to work on America's transcontinental railroad was interesting (and directly pertained to the plot), although, for the most part, very dryly narrated. By the time Mankell got back to present day Sweden, I was beginning to get a little hazy on some of the murder details and the Swedish characters. I managed to get myself back on track only to find that Mankell had a long, boring harangue in store for his readers. The author managed to move the side plot along eventually, but along the way he had one of his main characters read segments of political speeches that in real time were said to last four or five hours. As I listened to Mankell defend the likes of Chairman Mao and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, I began to understand how the character's captive audience must have felt.

This is a good book gone very, very bad. It reads more as an excuse for Mankell to preach his own leftist political views than as a book to be enjoyed by mystery/thriller fans. Had The Man from Beijing been properly edited, it could have been a gripping police procedural about a stunning crime. As is, it is a tremendous bore about a stunning crime.

Rated at: 1.5

For anyone planning to read this book, know that the real purpose of the book is not the mystery/thriller type (Inspector Wallender) novel that Mankell normally writes. Yes, there is a mystery here, but it's just a device to allow Mankell to pursue another purpose altogether. Mankell has been involved in Mozambique since 1985 (seven years before the end of their civil war). In 2009, Mozambique ranked 172 out of 182 on the UN's Human Development Index. Zimbabwe wasn't included because it refused to supply data to the UN agency. Mankell has written previously on the problems caused in Africa by the European Imperialism of the 19th century which left most of the continent unprepared for independence which came in the 1960s.

With all this in mind, Mankell has created a situation, where the Chinese Communist government is looking for a way to 'export' it's excess population. Since the late 1980s, when China opened it's economy to internal capitalism, a portion of the country has seen amazing growth. We're talking 10% growth for over twenty years. The upper strata of the Chinese, have become very wealthy and many cities (like Shanghai and Beijing) have taken on the look of Tokyo. But all this prosperity has been reserved to the coastal area of China, while 'deep China', the hinterlands have seen little change.

Mankell isn't the first European to write about the 'danger' that the peasantry represents to China and the governing Chinese Communist Party. Chinese American authors have written about the HCC (High Cadre Children) and how the new 'wealth' is concentrated in their hands; and how many of the manufacturing enterprises in the 'special economic zones' are 'owned' by the People's Liberation Army. Keep in mind that even if 200 million Chinese have a better life, that leave over one billion who still live in poverty. At what point will the 'non's' demand their share from the 'have's'?

Based on the polemics of the Chinese that are represented in this book, the best thing they can do is 'export' Chinese peasants to Southern Africa (Mozambique and Zimbabwe) where they can labor for both the indigenous and Chinese governments. The local politicos would be paid off, the local people would be kept down by the local police and military, and China would reap the profits of the exports. It would also be a release value for their excess population. Think of Southern Africa as China's own Siberia, a place to send dissidents, and to exploit for its' resources. This part is very provocative in it's vision for Africa.

But back to the book. The first third of the book is about a massacre in a small town in central Sweden. Nineteen of the twenty-two residents are murders with either a large knife (machete) or sword. The killer has only one clue, a red ribbon. A local is accused of the murders, and supposedly confesses before he commits suicide. The book then goes off a the "Chinese tangent" and doesn't get back to the murders until the last fifty pages.

This is NOT a police procedural and a political statement wrapped in a mediocre novel (at best).

Zeb Kantrowitz