Monthly Archives: April 2011

#5 Henning Mankell / The Man from Beijing

Posted on by Kat Hall
5

Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing, translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson (London: Vintage, 2011 [2008]). A gripping crime novel spanning a hundred years and four continents. Arguably a little over-ambitious, but a highly enjoyable read nonetheless 4 stars

Opening sentence: I, Birgitta Roslin, do solomnly declare that I shall endevour, to the best of my knowledge and in accordance with my conscience, to pass judgement without fear or favour, be the accused rich or poor, and according to the laws and statutes of Sweden…

My Easter treat was a copy of Henning Mankell’s The Man from Beijing. Like many others, I’ve been a Wallander fan for many years, but have come to enjoy Mankell’s standalone novels as well, and to admire his continued enthusiasm for writing and tackling big subjects when he could so easily be resting on his laurels.

The novel opens with the discovery of a brutal massacre in the remote northern hamlet of Hesjövallen that shocks the whole of Sweden. The first few pages are also liable to shock even a seasoned crime reader. As the Sunday Times quote on the back of the novel so accurately observes: ‘it is hard to think of a crime novel with a more grisly opening’. Snacking is not to be recommended for the first 50 pages.

After reading a newspaper report, Judge Birgitta Roslin realises that she has a family connection to two of the victims, and becomes increasingly involved in unravelling this highly unusual case, which has its beginnings in the harsh histories of nineteenth-century migration and colonial oppression. Taking Roslin and the reader on a sweeping set of individual, historical, political and geographical journeys, The Man from Beijing is both a detective novel and political thriller, featuring an eclectic range of characters from all over the world.

For this reader, one of the novel’s strongest points was the characterisation of Roslin and the policewoman Vivi Sundberg (thank you Mankell for creating these complex, interesting, older women!). The plot was also gripping, but perhaps overly ambitious in places, with different sections located in 2006 Sweden, 1860s China and America, as well as present-day China and Africa. Mankell is to be applauded for the scope of the history that he tries to show us, his exploration of the complex relations between Europe, America and China, and his illumination of developing economic ties between China and Africa, but towards the end of the novel I felt that these political strands were in danger of overshadowing the crime narrative.

That having been said, the novel was still an extremely satisfying and thought-provoking read. And it’s always good to see authors pushing the boundaries of the crime novel in interesting ways.

An extract from the novel is available here.

Mrs. Peabody awards The Man from Beijing a hearty 4 stars.

Crime novels that make you want to rant: Philip Kerr’s Field Grey (Bernie Gunther series #7)

Posted on by Kat Hall
79

Every now and then I read a crime novel that makes me feel grumpy, usually because of the poor quality of the writing, plotting or characterisation. Normally I don’t blog those kinds of reading experiences, and just move swiftly on to something more worthwhile. This post is going to be an exception to that rule, and concerns a once great series that has gone seriously off the rails.

A bit of a rant follows… You have been warned.

When I first discovered Philip Kerr’s ‘Berlin Noir’ trilogy in the 1990s, like many other readers I was in seventh heaven. March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991) were the best crime novels I’d read in a long time, a sublime marriage of historical crime fiction and hard-boiled noir. They were also the best I’d seen set in the Nazi and Alled Occupation periods, providing a nuanced portrait of everyday life under Hitler, during the war, and in the turbulent period immediately following defeat. Collectively, they provided readers with a detailed insight into Nazi ideology and its imple-mentation, grappled with weighty themes such as guilt, justice and accountability, and examined the moral difficulties of occupying an ‘insider/outsider’ status within the regime through the figure of P.I. and sometime policeman Bernie Gunther. I’m still nostalgic for those early reading experiences (an entire holiday spent sneaking off from my beloved family to hoover up a few more chapters in delicious solitude).

After this first trilogy of Bernie Gunther novels there was considerable radio silence, and most of us assumed that the series was complete. Then, fifteen years later in 2006, another installment was published, which was swiftly followed by another three works. Each of these I purchased and read with varying degrees of pleasure, until I reached Field Grey (Quercus 2010), when a suspicion simmering at the back of my mind finally became impossible to ignore.

My suspicion was this: that Philip Kerr had intended to end the Bernie Gunther series with the third novel, A German Requiem, and that when he decided to resurrect the series fifteen years later, he made the strategic decision to take the story not just forwards but also backwards in time: forwards into the post-war era, and back to before March Violets and to other portions of the Nazi era not covered in the first three books. To put it even more bluntly: Kerr realised that he had not exploited the success of the Gunther series sufficiently, and decided to have another bite of the cherry, along the lines of George Lucas and his Star Wars prequels.

This is what we see when we compare the basic details of the first three novels with those that follow:

March Violets                     1936 Nazi Germany

The Pale Criminal              1938 Nazi Germany

A German Requiem           1947 Occupied Germany and Austria

The One from the Other   1937 Berlin / 1949 Munich

A Quiet Flame                     1950 Buenos Aires / 1932 Berlin

If the Dead Rise Not           1936 Berlin / 1954 Havana

Field Grey                             1954 Cuba, New York, Germany / 1941 Minsk /

1931 / 1940 Germany / 1940 France / 1946 Russia, Germany

So the first three novels are straightforwardly chronological (1936-1947). The remainder continue to move forward in time, but zig-zag between the post-war ‘present’ and the Weimar, Nazi or immediate post-war pasts, and between Germany, Latin America and other nations involved in World War II. In other words, books 4-7 all have structures that allow the author to dip in and out of Bernie’s previous back-story and German/ wartime history at will, and to ‘open up’ as yet unexplored and lucrative literary territory. I’m prepared to bet that if Kerr had planned a seven novel series from the start he would have written it differently, probably governed by a more conventional chronological structure. And I reckon the novels would have held together much better as a totality if he had.

One could argue that the complex temporal structure of the later books make for a more interesting read, but in the case of Field Grey, which traces Bernie’s relationship with Erich Mielke (future big cheese in the GDR Stasi) from 1931 to 1954, this approach is tested to the limit. Furthermore, the arc of their twenty-year relationship doesn’t provide a strong enough framework to sustain the novel: while there are interesting observations about post-war guilt and justice, there’s no real plot, just a series of loosely related misadventures on Gunther’s part. More seriously, the considerable amount of *new* information given about Gunther’s past has the effect of overwhelming the portrayal of the detective and his life-story from earlier works of the series. It seems particularly implausible that many of the major life events recounted in Field Grey are not referenced by Gunther in the books that have gone before. And there are some problematic disparities, such as those arising from Gunther’s differing accounts of his tranfer from Minsk in A German Requiem (Berlin Noir, Penguin: 1993, pp.592-3) and in Field Grey (pp. 89-90).

In sum, my grumpiness on finishing Field Grey appears to have had two primary causes: firstly, the unfolding of a shaggy dog story in place of a decent plot, and, secondly, the manner in which this and the other ‘later’ novels interfere with Gunther’s characterisation and the beautifully rounded entity that is the ‘Berlin Noir’ trilogy. I can’t help feeling that it would have been wiser for Kerr to have left well alone (from an aesthetic if not from a commercial point of view).

I see that there is another Bernie Gunther novel coming out in October 2011 entitled Prague Fatale. I can only hope that the title indicates what I think it does, and that Bernie is given the dignified exit he deserves.

Rant over. Thanks if you made it this far 😉

Update: Since this post, Philip Kerr has published a ninth Gunther novel entitled A Man without Breath (Quercus 2013).

I look more closely (and without ranting) at the role of Bernie Gunther in a journal article published in Comparative Literature Studies (June 2013): ‘The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr’s The Pale Criminal, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister’s Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht’.

 

#4 Schenkel / The Murder Farm

Posted on by Kat Hall
4

Andrea Maria Schenkel, The Murder Farm [Tannöd], translated by Anthea Bell (London: Quercus, 2008 [2006]).  A short, beautifully written chiller, that lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned  5 stars

First line: I spent the first summer after the end of the war with distant relations in the country.

This slim book, the first crime novel by German writer Andrea Maria Schenkel, has sold over a million copies, scooped both the Deutscher Krimi Preis (2007) and Swedish Crime Fiction Prize (2008), and was adapted for film  in 2009.

The Murder Farm is a fictionalised account of a true story: the unsolved murder of the entire Danner family (farmer, wife, daughter, two children and a maid) on a remote Bavarian farm called Tannöd. As such, it’s drawn comparisons with Truman Capote’s famous work In Cold Blood (1966), which explored the murder of the American Clutter family in 1959.

I’m generally not one for ‘true crime’. In fact I positively go out of my way to avoid it. But this fictionalised treatment avoids the usual pitfalls of salaciousness and voyeurism to provide a compelling exploration, not just of the case itself, but of the victims, the murderer, and the community of which they form a part.

One interesting feature of the novel is its historical repositioning of the crime. The original murders apparently took place in the 1920s, but the author has chosen to transpose the action to the 1950s, the decade after the Second World War, when West Germany was struggling to come to terms with the Nazi past. The refusal to take responsibility for past crimes seeps into the narrative, resulting in an unflattering portrayal of small-minded rural attitudes and behaviours both during and after the war. (The seepage of an unsettling Nazi past into the present is a feature of a number of German crime novels, such as Jakob Arjouni’s Happy Birthday, Turk (1985), Pieke Biermann’s Violetta (1990), Petra Hammesfahr’s The Sinner (1999), and Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed (2000).)

On another level, the novel is a dissection of power relations: between family members, between men and women, and between the state and the individual. The work’s examination of gender relations is particularly disturbing.

The novel opens with a short passage by the nameless narrator, who had previously spent some time in the village and feels compelled to return following the news of the murder, to try to understand the transformation of a former childhood idyll into a tabloid ‘murder farm’. The remaining 40, brief chapters comprise interviews with various members of the farming community, passages from the perspective of murderer and murder victims, and prayers for the dead.

The narrator-as-detective and reader glean various clues to the identity of the murderer and the motivation for the crime from the individual accounts given by those close to the family, such as Betty (schoolfriend aged 8), Ludwig Eibl (postman aged 32) and Anna Meier (shopkeeper aged 52). However, the reader’s investigative function is privileged: he or she will come away from the narrative knowing who committed the crime (at least in this imagining of it), while the narrator and villagers remain none the wiser, with only two exceptions. Some form of justice may or may not prevail at the end, but the secrets and silences that typify this closed community will remain.

The Murder Farm is an excellent example of the crime genre’s ability to explore a range of weighty themes. The opening pages are available on Amazon here.

Mrs. Peabody awards The Murder Farm an unsettling and brilliantly creepy 5 stars.

BBC4 Spiral Season 3: The Butcher of La Villette

Posted on by Kat Hall
4

Tonight I caught the first two episodes of the French police procedural series Spiral (Engrenage in the original; literal translation ‘gears’).

My primary reason for watching Spiral was to fill the two-hour viewing gap left by The Killing, but I was also curious about the French series, having heard praise for seasons 1 and 2.  It was a interesting start tonight, and could easily become compelling viewing for me, as this crime drama features yet another strong female investigator, Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust). As in The Killing, the first two episodes also set up a number of complex characters, plotlines and intrigues, and redefine our image of the cities in question by focusing on the gritty underbellies of Copenhagen and Paris (the Little Mermaid and Eiffel Tower are conspicuous by their absence).

I wasn’t as gripped by the opening episodes of Spiral as those of The Killing, but then again, this might be an unfair expectation, especially as I’m coming in cold to season 3, and don’t have the in-depth knowledge of the investigative team that has been built up over previous two seasons.

One aspect I really didn’t like, however, was the graphic nature of the autopsy scenes. While a key focus of the series is forensic policework, I’m not convinced it was necessary to provide so much stomach-churning visual detail. And a side-effect of covering my eyes during those scenes was that I was unable to read the subtitles, thus no doubt missing vital clues!

So a slightly mixed experience for this viewer. But I reckon I’ll be back for another two episodes next week. Those who are intending to watch the whole series (10 parts) will be interested to know that The Guardian is blogging Spiral 3 episode by episode. A splendid public service. Merci!