Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)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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