Customer Reviews

The Return of the Dancing Master

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I've always loved a mystery, but I'm picky. A lot of authors who regularly make the bestseller lists leave me as cold as the corpses they write about (I'm not naming names for fear of casting aspersions on anyone else's taste). My pantheon includes the British classics (Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers) and their heirs (P.D. James and her ilk), but also some less decorous titles, like really good serial-killer yarns. And I'm partial to complex, gritty police procedurals with a European flavor --- like THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER.

Summarizing this novel, it sounds pretty melodramatic: War crimes. Neo-[Nationalsozialist]. A torture-murder. A second murder that looks like an execution. But like all Henning Mankell's mysteries, it is also powerfully matter-of-fact. The book is as much about the daily obsessions of Stefan Lindman --- a police officer with a cancer diagnosis, troubled memories of his father and an ambiguous relationship with an older woman --- as it is about getting shot at in the dark Swedish woods (though there is plenty of action, too). Lindman is a kind of an anti-hero: surprisingly earthy ("Of all the joys that life had to offer, peeing at the side of the road was the best"), relentlessly unglamorous, with the combination of intelligence and persistence that gets crimes solved. In this he is very much like Kurt Wallander, the protagonist of an earlier series of suspense novels by Mankell. They are both smart, rather isolated men struggling to make connections, and their flawed humanity is endearing.

Making connections, to solve a case and/or to save one's soul, is the essence of THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER (if you're wondering about the title, I'll say only that tango steps are an important clue). Partly to escape his fear of death (he's on sick leave, awaiting radiation treatments), Lindman leaves his home in the south of Sweden and goes north to investigate --- unofficially --- the murder of an older police officer he once worked with. He forms a friendly alliance with a local cop, Giuseppe Larsson (who blames his opera buffa name on his mother's major crush on an Italian crooner), and what started as a quick trip stretches into an obsessive pursuit of a murderer . . . or is it two murderers?

You think I'm going to tell? Not a chance. In any case, the thrill of chasing a killer is not the only attraction of THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER; there are larger issues here. The novel challenges the popular image of Sweden as irreproachably anti-[Nationalsozialist](or at least neutral) during World War II and suggests that the country harbors secret (...)organizations even today. The alertly political aspect of Mankell's work reminds me of the wonderful mysteries written in the 1960s and '70s by a Swedish couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (some have been reissued by Vintage): they share a fundamental decency, a penchant for social criticism and a strong sense of history.

Mankell's prose, like his characters, is plain rather than fancy, and the translation (by an Englishman, Laurie Thompson), not always in the American idiom ("take it with a pinch of salt"; "a bolt from the sky"), can seem stilted at first. But after a while it grows on you, like a foreign accent. And if your knowledge of Sweden is limited to Ingmar Bergman films, THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER gives a visceral sense of the country: frozen lakes, deep forests, piercing cold, people who keep to themselves and stay warm as best they can.

I must confess, though, that I missed Kurt Wallander. Now that I've read seven mysteries featuring this irresistible cop, he and I have a history: the details and texture of his life carry over from book to book. If you're new to Mankell, get acquainted with Wallander first. You won't be sorry.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

With any good Mankell novel, the reader is usually treated to a variety of philosophical views about big social and political issues that impact the individual and collective consciences. These treatments of big ideas seem to flow naturally from a very well controlled storyline that takes the reader through an extended adventure into the modern world of Nordic crime. Murder often comes with international terrorism, organized crime syndicates and radical political movements. In this non-Wallander special, "The Return of the Dancing Master", Mankell takes us into the northwestern forestlands of Sweden to the little town of Sveg to start this mystery. Lindman, a dangerously ill detective, on extended sick leave, decides to lend a hand in the ongoing investigation of the murder of his old partner, Molin. Coming from the south, he arrives with a mission to learn who killed his friend and bring him or her to justice. We quickly learn that Lindman, with all his good intentions, has no conceivable idea where this forensic search will take him. He will not be able to put aside the cancerous sore growing inside his mouth, nor will he be able to be indifferent to the demands of a personal relationship with Elena. He will also have to prevent himself from taking short cuts in concluding who the culprits really are. On the big front, frontier Sweden is portrayed as a world that hypocritically harbors the followers of an evil past, and it is that skanky environment that Lindman has wandered into unawares. Neo-Nazism is alive and thriving in modern Sweden under the very noses of a seemingly progressive yet indifferent society. As the awful truth emerges as to who Molin really was and how his father figured in it all, Lindman becomes even more dedicated to exposing the rotten system. As usual, the investigation of the murder leads in many different directions inside and outside the country, consuming all the moral fibre that Lindman has brought to the job. It is from the momentum of this fight for what is right that Lindman gains a new understanding about his own perspective on living. I recommend this novel to anyone who wants to understand what it can often involve when getting caught up in a holy crusade against the forces of evil. There are no easy or reassuring answers in this story; only a momentum that propels the hero to move in the right direction as he chases after the bad guys.

I was intrigued to read a book by Mankell other than the Kurt Wallender series of which I have read all but the yet to be released "The Fifth Woman" and I will say I found this book very involving and well written. However, while I find myself totally captivated by the Ystad/Wallender series (and perhaps this is due to my familiarity with the main character and his colleagues --similar to the many policeprocedurals of the Ruth Rendall/P.D. James genre) I found this book sort of going off into somewhat cliched terrritories -- almost of the Robert Ludlam/Fredric Forsyth types --with inklings of (...) plots and several plot twists that were less than plausible. Interestingly, though he was described as quite different than Wallender (younger, etc) I kept on visualizing Wallender on this case. In short, I enjoyed the read but found much of it to be filler and fortunately I hung into the end which was very exciting.

This was the third Mankell mystery I'd read (the other two are "Die falsche Fährte", " Brannvegg", then later "Hunde von Riga") and it's fully up to par. Hard to say whether Firewall is really better. Here, as in "Firewall" (and as opposed to "Die falsche Fährte") the book takes off and flies from the beginning. The suspense builds enormously but there came a point where I doubted, with all the tangled loose threads, if Mankell could bring it to a decent ending (according to John Berger, and maybe Kafka as well, a writer should never have a specific ending in mind, just let it fall out as the writing progresses). Anyway, the book ended reasonably after all. Highly recommendable. Mankell and Donna Leon are the only mysteries I can tolerate, having read Sherlock Holmes much earlier in life.

This review is based on the Norwegian translation, "Danselærerens tilbakkekomst".

I don't know what it is that has suddenly caused this rise in recognition of foreign writers, but it can only be a good thing. Jose Carlos Somoza, Boris Akunin, Karin Fossum, Carlo Lucarelli, and the Dark Wintry King of them all, Henning Mankell, who is increasingly a phenomena. His books fly off the shelves on mainland Europe, he's mobbed in the streets in his native Sweden, in Germany he apparently outsells J.K. Rowling (it's about time someone did), and half-Swedish Ruth Rendell has taken the trouble to read all the novels in their original language, admiring the fascinating procedural detail, which is just one of Mankell's strengths. He never shies from portraying the dull of aspects of routine police-work, but somehow manages to put such a spin on them as to make them interesting. And although The Return of the Dancing Master is a departure from his ever-better Kurt Wallander series - although it may as well not be, for how similar and ominously gloomy the two different protagonists are, it is just as excellent, and probably even better.

Retired policeman Herbert Molin lives a hermetic existence in a lonely house in the middle of a North-Sweden forest. Whatever he's hiding from, he's eluded it for 11 years, occupying himself with his fears, his jigsaw puzzles, and his dancing. Then, one day he is found beaten and lashed, lying dead in the snow on the edge of the wood. In his house, bloody footprints pattern the floor, marking out the steps of his favourite dance, the tango.

When Stefan Lindman, on sick-leave and obsessed with death having recently been diagnosed with cancer, reads of his old colleagues murder, he ventures north to the forests of Molin's retreat in order to try and find out more about who killed him, and in doing so places himself into a bleak investigation that stretches itself back to the evil acts of the second world war, and forces him to confront uncomfortable truths about his modern-day Sweden.

I can well see how Mankell's books, this one in particular, may not be suited to all. The Return of the Dancing Master - this title has quickly jumped to the top of my "Favourite Book Titles" list - is a dark, bleak and intense book with a heavy, dark atmosphere. There is little sunlight to be glimpsed anywhere, literally or metaphorically. So this is not for people who like their fiction light and happy, but more melancholy and affecting.

Sweden is evoked brilliantly, which is important as setting is one of the three necessary factors required in order to make a crime book effective, the other two being plot and character, where Mankell succeeds as well. The vast lonely forests of Northern Sweden contribute effectively to the bleakness (as you can tell, "bleak" is very much a watch-word here) of the book, and it is clear that Mankell has a very good handle on his country, and although is fond of it, shows us the things which worry him about modern Sweden, which he has said he thinks is a "pretty average" society. Here we are treated to bigotry, racism and neo-Nazism in pretty heavy doses, which makes for some disturbing scenes, and along with the atmosphere and the morbidity-obsessed lead character, it all correlates into a pretty dark book. Dark but brilliant, though. Mankell is an incredibly powerful writer, and that gift is on display here right from the beginning. The prologue gives us a vision of the executions of Nazi war criminals in 1945, and then in the first chapter we read terrified yet gripped by the throat as a scared, lonely old man's isolated home is assaulted in the dark, the windows shot out and he himself slaughtered.

The Return of the Dancing Master is bleak, yes, but it is fascinating, chilling, with the traditional flawed-hero (just what IS it about these kinds of people???) and it's refreshingly unformulaic. The plot is not once predictable, and constantly shifts beneath the reader to create a kind of gutsy suspense and a great pace. It's not quite perfect (there are a couple of kinks in the translation, I think, but that's forgivable) but apart from that it nearly is! A dark, excellent story by an incredibly talented writer, and I am absolutely sure that this will end up as one of my favourite reads of the year. If you want to try Mankell, start here. Whatever the price, the experience of this is well-worth it.

I agree with the reviewers above about the plot, but that's about all the good stuff I can say unfortunately. The prose doesn't live up to the plot and I've struggled to finish the book because it's so simply written. Not 'simply written' in a minimalist way, but in a written for a teen way. The text doesn't grab you or draw you in even though the plot has plenty of potential. Simply put, it reads like a translation.
Disappointing.

This book was well done but it was a tease as the visiting detective kept threatening to go home-bad ploy and the resident detective never sleeps except on duty. With the Iraq situation and radical muslims out there as terrorists, a Nazi and neo Nazi
theme is over the top especially as the author is so familiar with Africa and clearly people from that part of the world are floating around Sweden up to no good. I hope his next book is more with it as muslim terrorists are busy committing crimes in order to finance their operations including murders which could make for a now police procedural. But Mankell is very good much better than Karin Fossum who needs to go to school on Mankell's
Kurt Wallender series. Her detective is boring.