A Frozen Archipelago
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Much of this story is set in and among the small barren islands of the Östergötland archipelago in the Baltic off the East coast of Sweden. And the novel suits the setting, bleak and emotionally icebound, but with a curious fascination that will not let you stop reading. It is written like an archipelago too, in very short chapters (206 in 403 pages), some little more than a paragraph, with a lot of white space between them. The style is unadorned and declarative; even emotional matters are stated flatly, as facts of the moment, with little sense of movement through time. But time does inch forward between one brief chapter and the next, almost imperceptibly, like a slow drip of water, gradually eroding any sense of normality and order.
Mankell has always written simply and clearly; I enjoy his Inspector Wallander mysteries (especially THE FIFTH WOMAN) for their combination of straightforward storytelling and psychological insight, set within a realistic portrayal of contemporary Swedish life. I know I will read others in the series with pleasure, but DEPTHS is completely different. Instead of the concrete present, it takes place in an uncertain past, at the outbreak of the 1914-18 war when Sweden's neutrality was still in doubt. Instead of being rooted in cities and towns on dry land, it takes place mostly at sea, on ships or tiny rocky islands. Instead of opening to a rich social world of human beings interacting with one another, it gradually closes in to the mind of one man, obsessive, misanthropic, ultimately mad, as he gradually loses all normal contact with his fellow human beings.
The book begins in madness, a woman escaping from a mental hospital. She is soon recaptured, and we flash back to 1914 to meet her husband, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, sane, upright, and well respected. A Swedish naval officer, he is charged with making depth soundings that will establish secret channels between offshore islands for naval vessels to use in case of war. Svartman pursues his work with obsessive professionalism; if there are strange things about him, we assume they have to do with details of his secret mission which will be revealed in due course. Only gradually do we see his obsession as part of his character, and secretiveness as his very essence. By the time he encounters a woman living alone on one of the islands, and gets drawn into a double life of secrets upon secrets, his downward spiral becomes inevitable. The poor woman of the prologue may have lost her reason, but the cause of her madness lies elsewhere.
Imagine a Dostoyevsky on downers, cooler, less complex, but with the same dogged pursuit of his protagonist as he declines into psychosis. I hated this book, but have to admire Mankell's power as a writer. Even in translation, the man is good!
