Henning Mankell – After the Fire

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After the Fire, Book Review, Henning Mankell, Marlaine Delargy (translator)

A slow burn, and then the reader is pinioned by ice – with no Wallander in sight

Henning Mankell’s last book, published after his death, is one of several he wrote which were free of the detective genre, though crimes there are, and trying to understand the who and the why is part of the journey made, by the central character, and the reader.

After the Fire takes up a story already followed some years ago, in his 2006 Italian Shoes (translated into English in 2009) This was meant to be a series, I believe, as the book was described as the first in the Fredrik Welin series. This is now the second, and final one, translated by Marlaine Delargy.

Firstly, rest assured, you do not have to have read Italian Shoes in order to understand or enjoy this. I did do so, back in the day, but have forgotten most of it, though I recollected its melancholy tone. Central character, in both novels is retired surgeon, Fredrik Welin. Welin was in late middle age in the first book, retired from his profession after a mishap, and retreated to a gloomy, dark, half resentful half embracing isolation on a sparsely populated island in the Swedish archipelago. His was not a character who handled humanity at large up close and personal well :

The view from the window was the same as the view in many other countries. The densely packed traffic induced in me a feeling of despair about the world into which I had been born and in which I happened to live. What were these people, many of them alone in their cars, thinking? Were they thinking at all?

Welin is now in his 70s. He is not a likeable man, not one to warm to. He dislikes most people. He had a difficult relationship with his estranged wife (the trajectory of Italian Shoes involved her final illness and death) and a challenging relationship with the daughter he never knew he had. This challenging relationship still continues, and is, for the most part, full of occasional unsatisfactory phone and internet communications.

Mankell has not given us a character to easily empathise with. He is irascible, suspicious, gloomy, self-sufficient and, at the same time, needy. He knows he lacks easy ability to make and keep friendships – though, nonetheless his fellow eccentric island dwellers – all pretty much those preferring isolation to connection, – seem to have affection for him. He is also lustful, and still dreams of a romantic connection, though he feels somewhat foolish for holding these yearnings.

An inexplicable fire in Welin’s home, which appears to have been deliberately started, alarming the community, is the precipitation of a whole series of events which challenge his long, settled into a somewhat grumpy, predictable existence. Firstly, he is suspected of having started the fire himself, in order to make a fraudulent insurance claim. Partly to clear himself, he begins to try and investigate. A local journalist becomes a kind of friend and fellow investigator. Further fires happen in the homes of others on the archipelago. The original fire, completely burning down Welin’s home brings him back into better contact with his difficult, also dysfunctional, adult daughter. The home, after all, would have been her inheritance.

I went up to the counter and explained that I had no bank cards and no ID; everything had been lost in the fire. The clerk recognised me but didn’t seem to be quite sure what to do. A person without any form of ID always constitutes some kind of threat nowadays

Now, this probably does not sound like the most absorbing read – but, if you are someone who likes books about complex, tangled, difficult human relationships, and the challenges, particularly between parents and their adult children, as the ravages of age and time lend an urgency to some kind of reconciliation and understanding – I would say this will be indeed, absorbing.

The ‘crime’ – who the arsonist is – may be obvious to the reader quite early – but the ‘solving’ isn’t the point of the book – it is Welin’s journey, where he must come to understand himself, and others, which matters. After I had settled into the realisation this was not a novel about action, but one of unfolding reflection, I was hooked

Ageing, death, loneliness, redemption, finding a meaning, in the face of there being none.

One day I will walk through into the land where memory has been swallowed up by forgetfulness

All, beautifully written. Mankell always one to think into meaning, always writing about wider than individuals

Escapist fiction this is surely not.

I received this as an ARC from the publishers, via NetGalley

It will be published on October 5th

After the Fire Amazon UK
After the Fire Amazon USA

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Jennifer Egan – Manhattan Beach

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1930s setting, Book Review, Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach, Novels about America, Second World War

A big, old-fashioned, absorbing historical narrative – America in Depression and At War

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach follows the story of two different tranches of the American immigrant experience, and is set during the Depression and the Second World War.

There are 3 stories followed, which interlink with each other through Anna’s story. At the start of the novel Anna Kerrigan is nearly 12, a young girl idolising her father, and close to her mother and her sick sister. Father Eddie struggles, as so many working men did, at this time, to make a living. He has lost much in the crash and is now working as a kind of muscle for a longshoreman union official. Keeping the family together, particularly with the medical needs of Anna’s sister Lydia, is not easy.

Eddie has decided to take a chance on getting more lucrative work – but this must come at a price, as he intends to offer his expertise to Dexter Styles, a man with mob connections, who has hidden his Italian background, and is riding high in society, happily married. The family he has married into is old money, established class. Everyone knows he is somehow connected, still to ‘a shadow government, a shadow country..A tribe. A clan’ He is though someone who is good at subterfuge, though there are plenty of rumours about him, and as long as no one looks too closely at the source of his wealth, and is just happy enough with that wealth, he, and they, will get along fine.

Eddie has taken Anna along to his job ‘interview’ with Dexter, as knowing something about a man’s family gives him a certain edge and information. And Eddie will be offered employment

Egan then takes a forward jump, and we, like Anna, are in the position of ‘something happened’ – but we don’t quite know what. All we know is that at some point, some years ago, Eddie disappeared. Anna still holds a memory of the mysterious Mr Styles, and the glamour of his house, on that day Eddie took her along. It is now Anna’s job to keep the family together. America is now at war. War has created opportunities for young women, working in fields never open to them before. Anna is now one of a female workforce employed in Brooklyn’s Naval Yard, measuring and inspecting tiny parts for battleships. She has a better dream – the desire to be a diver, to inspect and repair vessels underwater.

This whole section of Anna’s story, her struggle to work in an area thought unsuitable for a woman, was particularly fascinating.

There is also a more conventional story beginning – a chance encounter between Anna and Styles in a nightclub – she recognises him, but he has no idea who she is, especially as when she introduces herself she gives a false last name – a story which will be in part a detective story, and in part a love story. Anna wants to find out the truth about her father’s disappearance, and the mysterious Mr Styles is a sensible place to start

Anna’s story, Dexter’s story – and also the story of Eddie’s disappearance. And it is also the story of capital, labour, and the American Dream

I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever….Not the Romans. Not the Carolingians, Not Genghis Khan or the Tatars or Napoleon’s France….How is that possible you ask. Because our dominance won’t arise from subjugating peoples. We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible

High money and low money, muscle, graft, honest labour and labour less honest, corruption, class, race and sexual prejudice – it’s a big canvas.

I did not get to read Egan’s Pulitzer, A Visit From The Goon Squad (though I am minded to, now) That was, I understand, a far more experimental/unusual structure. This is not, though we do have the 3 voices, and the 3 stories, but the structure is a conventional narrative. I found it a fascinating read, particularly because I am drawn to books which engage with describing hard physical work – stuff of craft and muscle.

I could not resist adding this YouTube first part upload of John Adams’ magnificent Harmonielehre, a version conducted by Simon Rattle. The spur to its composition was the idea of a great tanker rising through the air. As I read the physicality of the Naval Yard workplace sections, Adam’s amazing piece, with its incredible opening, was in my mind’s ear

I received this as an ARC from the publisher, Simon and Schuster, via Netgalley. Gratefully.

It will be published on October 3rd

Manhattan Beach Amazon UK
Manhattan Beach Amazon USA