Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Unless I’m missing something major, I knew everything that was going to happen in this book by maybe 1/4 of the way through. There are no cliffhangers, no hair’s-breadth escapes, no Sudden Realizations That The World Is A Far Blacker Place Than Anyone Previously Fathomed.

It starts so promisingly. Inspector Kurt Wallander is called to a farmer’s field where a girl has been standing all day. The farmer has tried unsuccessfully to get her off the field, and finally he’s called the cops. Wallander chases her until, unexpectedly, she douses herself with a can of gasoline and lights herself on fire.

The next day Wallander happens upon a murder victim whose head has been split in two and who’s been scalped.

How could these two ghastly events be connected?

Isn’t that a promising beginning? Yet without cliffhangers or much in the way of actual drama (the initial killing, and subsequent ones, are deployed with a minimum of fuss), what sustains the story? Mankell has left himself few choices: it can’t rest on anything but Wallander’s thought processes. We watch him try to reach the same conclusions that we had reached long ago. Perhaps Mankell hopes that’ll be enough — that we’ll grow tense as Wallander comes closer to the truth. If so, Mankell hasn’t set up enough architecture to make it so. There’s a moment of tension toward the end, and Mankell executes that moment quite competently. But then it’s over. Almost as soon as that climax happens, it’s as though Mankell has grown bored of his own book.

Let’s not even speak of the dialogue, which is dreary and flat. Characters say near-clichés like “…Unless he strikes again” as though reading them directly from a bus schedule.

Just a flat book. Enough energy to sustain you for 400 pages, but just barely. Having put it down, it’s unlikely I’ll remember anything from it a month from now. And I’m not tempted to read any more Mankell.

I’ve meant to read the mystery novelist Henning Mankell for years — ever since I read Geoff Pullum’s Language Log post about him.

Over the few years since then, I’ve seen Mankell referred to quite a number of times, and have seen some really handsome editions of his books in various book stores (including the redoubtable Harvard Book Store). Indeed, I think what finally tipped me over the edge is that the covers are so alluring. See in particular the cover to Sidetracked, at right, which I’m about to start tonight.

I picked that one after Prof. Pullum was grateful enough to reply to my unsolicited book-recommendation email. I have a book problem, which I believe I’ve mentioned on here before: if I read one book by the author, and it stinks, I’m unlikely to read any more by him. If I read an amazing first book, though, I will soldier through three or four terrible ones by the same author. That’s kind of how I read Saul Bellow: Herzog is a desert-island book, and I was lucky enough to start with that. (Not sure how: maybe researching Philip Roth?) Next up, I believe, was Dangling Man; I believe some novel that took place in the 1940’s described it as a harbinger of a literary revolution. Dangling Man felt very flat to me; I was supposed to care about the character, but didn’t at all. (My memory says, “Holden Caulfield, home alone during World War II.”) And it lacked the intellectual maturity of Herzog. My third Bellow was The Adventures of Augie March, which everyone likes to stroke. I couldn’t stand it. It very much wanted to be The Great American Novel; our hero was self-consciously the American Everyman, stalking about through the American wilderness. It was too self-absorbed for its own good, and needed a few good whacks with a meat cleaver. I don’t have the cites to back it up, but I think even Bellow realized in his later years that Augie March was too undisciplined.

So by that point in my Bellow career, I was 1 for 3; had Herzog been anything different than it is, I would have surely stopped there. Then I read Mr. Sammler’s Planet, which is the natural follow-up to Herzog. Like its predecessor, Sammler is beautiful and intellectual and heartbreaking. So that got me through More Die Of Heartbreak, which felt like the unfortunate spawn of Augie March and Herzog : wishing very much to be intellectual, but ending up with Cargo Cult Intellectualism.

That leaves me where I am today with Bellow, at 2 for 5. I’ll still gladly read anything available by the man, though I’ve not in a while. Henderson the Rain King is crawling up from the back of my head, and will probably materialize on my shelf soon.

I gave most of that very long setup about Bellow to Prof. Pullum, as background for why it matters quite a lot which Mankell novel I start with. If he’s as good as Prof. Pullum’s partner Barbara thinks, I should read all of his novels, no?

Barbara and Prof. Pullum were generous enough to respond: I should start with Sidetracked. And so I will, tonight. I can’t wait.