Digging for truth in Mozambique

Crime:One of the many ironies that vein Henning Mankell's work is that the first in the series of his best-selling police procedural novels set in Sweden (Faceless Killers, published in 1991 with an English translation following in 1997) was written in Mozambique, where Mankell had settled after establishing the Avenida Theatre in Maputo.

A phlegmatic Swedish police superintendent, Kurt Wallander, investigates specific crimes in the context of commenting on the more general malaise that has affected Sweden since the murder of its then prime minister, Olof Palme, in 1986.

Mankell's latest novel, a stand-alone, observes a similar narrative arc while broadening the horizons of its protagonist. Louise Cantor is a fifty-something archaeologist who travels home to Stockholm from a dig in Greece to discover her son, Henrik, dead in his apartment. The police are quietly adamant that Henrik committed suicide but her devastation can't blind Louise to details only a mother would see. Determined to establish the truth of Henrik's death, Louise embarks on a quest for justice that finds her criss-crossing the globe but returning time and again to a small village in rural Mozambique.

The sublimated anger that has served Mankell so well in his characterisation of Wallander is more nakedly apparent in Kennedy's Brain, and this novel suffers for it. Mankell is writing with his heart on his sleeve, and the subject matter, the western world's callous indifference to Africa's modern plague, is a worthy one. Unfortunately, Mankell's ambition exceeds his grasp. In attempting to blend the tropes of the traditional crime novel with serious literary concerns, he falls between two stools, creating on the one hand an unsatisfying - albeit realistic - tale of a frustrated investigation (the novel finishes at the end of what most crime novelists would consider their first act), on the other a narrative that too often substitutes repetition for nuance and polemic for insight.

"It was like one of the many shattered Grecian urns she had faced during her life," Louise reflects as she examines a heap of Henrik's papers. "A pile of tiny pieces, and her task was to produce a phoenix from the ashes of a vase smashed a thousand years ago." An archaeologist mother sifting through the ruins of her son's life is an intriguing conceit, but even the most patient reader will tire of a good hook after encountering a dozen variations.

Of course, it's impossible not to empathise with Louise's plight and her desire to uncover the truth of Henrik's death, and she makes for a likeably caustic companion on an odyssey through the murky underworld of Africa's poverty, corruption and disease.

Mankell gets under her skin and inhabits Louise to a degree unusual in a third-person narrative, offering crafty sleight-of-hand switches in narrative voice that are as unsettling, given Louise's grief, as they are convincing. Less plausible are the people Louise meets on her journey. Despite the fact that she travels to Australia, Sweden, Spain and Mozambique, all the characters speak in the same clipped, monotonous tone - although it's possible that individual nuances were lost in the translation - and all are irritatingly prone to oblique dissimulation.

Less forgivable is the fact that the shadowy figures who conspire to thwart Louise's investigation seem to have a bizarre reluctance to terminate her search, despite her vulnerability, even though they're quite enthusiastic about murdering peripheral characters who help her on her quest.

This is an unmistakably sincere attempt to communicate the horrors facing sub-Saharan Africa and a noble failure at attempting to bring contemporary crime writing to bear on issues that affect a significant swathe of the world's population. That it doesn't convince as a novel is in one sense irrelevant. In the long run, and for all his awards and commercial success, Mankell's willingness to put his reputation on the line for the sake of faceless millions may well prove his enduring legacy.

Declan Burke is the author of  The Big O and the editor of the website www.crimealwayspays.blogspot.com , an Irish crime fiction resource

Kennedy's Brain By Henning Mankell Harvill Secker, 328pp. £16.99