What is the cost to the human soul of looking too long into the abyss of crime? Can we be trained to slough off its ugliness, or must we always be tarnished by witnessing its destructive outcomes? It is a vital question not only for society, which seeks to understand and reduce crime, but for our police as well. For it is they who must repeatedly wade into the darkest corners of civilization, reconstruct there the grimmest crimes, and imagine from them the possible motives for such cruel deeds. Can they withstand such journeys without thinking the worst of us, or is it too much to understand the dark geography of the human soul without succumbing to its siren's call? Mr. Mankell deals with this question and more in this first, cold instalment in his famed series. His answer is not encouraging.
Hailing from the farmlands of southern Sweden, Kurt Wallander is a police officer as brilliantly insightful as he is self-destructive. For though he possesses all the characteristics one desires in a criminal investigator, diligence, doggedness and thoroughness, he is capable of bouts of anger, moroseness and self-pity all-too-typical of the average human. No wonder then that he has relinquished his wife to divorce, his best friend to horse-breeding and his daughter nearly to suicide, grave losses that have left him with only his father and sister as social connections to the broader world. The former, a painter, has never approved of his choice to become a cop and the latter has made her own life, well away from tiny Ystad in which nothing ever happens.
All that changes on January 11th, 1990, when, in the midst of a cold night, an elderly couple are brutally attacked in their farmhouse. Tortured and tormented, the husband dies before help can reach them while his wife manages to survive the week in hospital. There, before she joins her husband in death, she whispers to the police the only clue to the origins of her attackers, a single word that has the power to shatter the homogeneous peace of this sleepy town. "Foreign..." Armed with this trigger to a social timebomb, Kurt Wallander leads a team of local police on a search for the couple's ruthless murderers all while trying to prevent Ystad from succumbing to the savagery of ethnic strife.
As emotionally remote as it is chillingly authentic, Faceless Killers is perhaps the best example of that brand of Nordic crime fiction which has since been made so internationally famous by Stieg Larsson's best-selling Millennium Trilogy. One of Larsson's inspirations, Mr. Mankell, here, rejects the sensationalism of more Western crime fiction, so populated by mass-murdering fiends and the innocent women they prey upon, for a single act of violence which is all the more potent for standing alone amidst a sea of procedural drama. Here, less is very much more as the reader watches, through Wallander, a town try to come to grips with that which does not happen in peaceful Scandinavia.
The investigation, whose numbing monotony bleeds authenticity, is almost secondary to Mr. Mankell's journey of social anthropology which, without bias, reveals the limitations of homogeneity. Any crime, any negative development, is automatically blamed on external influences. After all, no native would be capable of such evil. In reality, every culture produces its own bad apples. Only multiculturalism has the power to remove our xenophobic blinders and allow us to see that, at root, we are all the same.
Wallander is the representation of this xenophobia. He is outwardly a pillar of the community while, inwardly, he is an impulsive drunk who can only flail helplessly as his various relationships deteriorate around him. He does his job with commendable skill and determination while a profound misery engulfs him. He does his duty while being pessimistic about the future of Sweden and, more broadly, humanity. His troubled goodness is a wonderful depiction of the life of a policeman in a world of white.
Not without its issues; the work is arid and overly procedural. However, given that these are qualities necessary for the novel to make its numerous points about the human condition, it's hard to imagine how the author could have avoided these drawbacks. Chilling work. (4/5 Stars)
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