"The Pyramid" by Henning Mankell

Patrick O'Brian said in interview that his only regret about his Aubrey / Maturin novels is that he did not begin the narrat8ive at an earlier point in time. Mankell obviously feels the same way because he has now published a prequel to his Wallender novels.

The Pyramid is said in the author's note to have been put together from various ideas about Walenderl as a younger man which he sketched out and then discarded. They form a number of short stories. Only The Pyramid itself is of any real length. They are an interesting read, from which the female characters do not emerge well. Both Wallender's wife and sister are pretty appalling. Yet at this time he still has a good, though distant, relationship with Linda. his daughter.

More importantly, Mankell decided to publish The Pyramid to make explicit something of which he became increasingly aware while writing the later books, namely that they formed a narrative debate on Swedish society, and in particular on what has become known as "the Swedish model". In the introduction he asks the specific question of whether, if the welfare state and democracy are seen an linked, one can survive without the other. Sjowall and Wahloo, of course posed this question bluntly in their books, showing that despite the level of welfare provision, crimes are still committed, and great inequality remains. From their avowedly Marxist viewpoint, this is the result of oppression of a gullible proletariat by a capitalist system. For Mankell, more a matter of human nature and his actually more puzzling.

Throughout The Pyramid, the same question keeps cropping up. What is happening to Sweden? Surely things like this don't happen here? There is a sense of dislocation between the dream and reality. Towards the end, Wallender is debating this point with a colleague. If the welfare state provides for everyone, why do people need to commit crimes? His colleague poses a disquieting possibility. Is it democracy itself which no longer works? If people feel excluded from the political process, unconsulted and ignored, perhaps they commit crimes as some sort of existentialist statement? Or, as he calls it, "a rite".

Mankell has always been a good, thoughtful writer who just happens to write about crime. The Pyramid offers another dimension to the Wallender stories. At least now one can read the entire series in sequence. If only British publishers would do the same for Fred Vargas.

Apologies for lack of recent posts, and "Open Book"

First, many apologies for not having posted recently. I have been writing rather than reading. Since my last post a few weeks back I have delivered not one but two finished books to the publishers.

One, Lucia on Holiday, will hopefully be of interest to many who read book blogs as it is the next instalment of my continuation of the classic Mapp and Lucia stories. I can be heard discussing it with Mariella on Radio 4's Open Book at 4pm on Sunday.

"The Waste Land" nominated for a prize

You heard it first from Pursewarden! Duly praised by this blog on its release (see review in May 2010 archive), Simon Acland's wonderful book "The Waste Land" has now been nominated for a People's Book Prize. You can vote for it here.

"Milligan and Murphy" by Jim Murdoch

I have reviewed both Jim Murdoch's previous novels and have thoroughly enjoyed doing so. Rather than following that particular story any further, though, Murdoch has embarked in a totally new direction. Milligan and Murphy expressly refers to Mercier and Camier, a Beckett novel in which two men repeatedly try to leave a particular town without success, and the allusion is obvious as out two eponymous heroes first finally leave the town of their birth on a whim and then spend the rest of the book walking to other places which seem exactly the same, while debating while they left in the first place and dealing with their guilt about having abandoned their mother. In Beckett's book, Camier is a private eye, and in a nice touch Murdoch has the two boys successfully located by a private eye hired by their mother, allowing a few wry reflections on the nature of the detective's process.

There are other influences too. Surely the name of the first character is not accidental, for there are frequent whiffs of Puckoon, one of Jim's (and my) favourite books, and I thought I detected a sense of Jack Trevor Story in some of the dialogue. Jim's unique voice shines through, however, and just as well since he is a very fine writer indeed.

It is particularly impressive that he has managed to produce a novel which is so different in subject matter, style and characterisation from his first two. I can only begin to guess how many hours it must have taken to think himself into the minds of his characters.

I am not going to reveal the ending, not least because there is an amusing and thought-provoking passage about the nature of the end to a novel. In order to know the ending, the author argues, you have to know at which point in the story the writer decided to stop telling it.

I really recommend this book. It is available online from FV Books

2011 Christmas Quiz - with answers

Having been accused by all and sundry of making these much too difficult in the past, I have decided to limit this year's to just ten questions. All of them concern writers who either write under different names, or are themselves fictional creations.

1. Who wrote well over 100 books over the course of a long career utilising both his own name and roughly 22 others, including Margeret Cooke  and J.J. Marric? A: John Creasey
2. Which well-known poet wrote detective fiction under a pseudonym, featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways? Both names, please. A: Cecil Day Lewis, Ncholas Blake
3. Who write a number of books in which a female detective writer, once herself put on trial for murder, features as one of the leading characters alongside an aristocratic companion? Author and character, please. A: Dorothy L.Sayers, Harriet Vane
4. The "Alexandria Quartet" features not one but two writers, one of whom acts as the narrator of the first volume. Who is the other, already an established novelist at the time of the story? A: Pursewarden (of course)
5. Who is the real author of "Hermione's Five o'clock chit chat" in "Lucia in London"? A: Stephen Merriall
6. By what name is Eric Blair better known? A: George Orwell
7. Which well-knonw historical writer with an active fan following used her maiden name of Halliday to write detective fiction in the 1960s and 1970s? A: Dorothy Dunnett (Halliday)
8. Under what name did Elizabeth Mackintosh write? A: Josephne Tey
9. As James Hilton he wrote "Goodbye Mr Chips" and "Lost Horizon", which became the film "Shangri-La", but what was the writer's real name? A: Glen Trevor
10. In Simon Raven's "Alms for Oblivion" series, which former army office becomes a successful novelist? A: Fielding Gray