Wallander's goodbye

Joseph Mahon reviews Henning Mankell's final Wallander novel, The Troubled Man.

Simone de Beauvoir's mother, though dying of stomach cancer, had "a very easy death."

By contrast, Kurt Wallander, the introspective police detective in Henning Mankell's The Troubled Man, has a horrible, protracted death. The abrupt, penultimate paragraph of the novel informs us that "The shadow grew more intense. And Kurt Wallander slowly descended into a darkness that some years later transported him into the empty universe known as Alzheimer's disease."

This is the way that Mankell brings his celebrated Wallander detective series to an end. Because of his encroaching mental decay, from which he suffers intermittently during his latest and last case, Wallander will be forced to take early retirement. He will become an even bigger danger to himself, having already almost set his house on fire by forgetting to turn off a stove. He will become acutely dependent on others, and this impending condition generates the central social and philosophical question of the novel: Who can you depend on when you become totally dependent?

Wallander is a "troubled man" because he realises that there are only two options available to him when he descends into dependency: either his family will care for him, or he will end up in a nursing home. Each of these alternatives is explored in the novel.

But first there is the option of suicide - an option which he has considered once before.

His daughter Linda had attempted suicide when she was a teenager, and this had made him look into the abyss. He describes the incident as follows: "He had found her slurring her words, with an empty jar of pills by her side. The panic he felt at that moment was something he had never experienced again. It was the biggest failure of his life - not having realised how bad she felt as a vulnerable teenager. He shook off the painful memory. He was convinced that if she had died, he would have taken his own life as well."

An ex-lover, Baiba, dying of a liver cancer which has metastasised, has also considered the suicide option. She has it all worked out: "When I feel that the end is imminent and unavoidable, I won't prolong the torture. I have access to pills and injections. I intend to die with a bottle of champagne by my bed. I'll drink a toast to the fact that, despite everything, I was able to experience the singular adventure of being born, living and one day disappearing into the darkness once again." On her way home to Riga - following her farewell visit to Wallander - a heavily intoxicated Baiba crashes her car into a wall.

This is not the carefully controlled suicide she had intended, but it looks like a suicide nonetheless.

In The Troubled Man, Wallander investigates the disappearance of Hakan von Enke, a retired naval commander who had played a prominent role in the policing of Sweden's territorial waters against the incursions of foreign, and especially Soviet, submarines. The case becomes more sinister when von Enke's wife, Louise, also disappears and is later murdered by agents unknown, using a substance perfected by East German assassination squads. There is a family connection, too, with Wallander. Von Enke's son Hans - a hedge fund manager - and Wallander's daughter Linda live together, and have a baby daughter, Klara. But unknown to Hans, he also has a sister, Signe, who is severely disabled and, as a consequence, "needed special care from the very first day of her life."

Wallander locates the nursing home where Signe has spent most of her life, and is shown to her room: "It was a bright room with a plastic mat on the floor. It held a couple of chairs, a bookcase and a bed, on which Signe von Enke lay hunched up." Wallander witnesses a scene of utter desolation: "He took a step closer to the bed and looked at Signe. She had fair, short-cropped hair and looked a bit like Hans, her brother. Her eyes were open but staring vacantly out into the room. She was breathing irregularly, as if every breath caused her pain. Wallander felt a lump in his throat. Why did a human being have to suffer like this? With no hope of a life with even an illusory glimmer of meaning? He was in a strange museum, he thought, a place where he was forced to look at an immured person. The girl in the tower. Immured inside herself."

We may safely assume that Wallander doesn't want to end his days like that. So who will care for him during his final years? His ex-wife Mona - a recovering alcoholic - certainly won't, nor would Wallander want her to. But his daughter Linda - a policewoman - and his grandaughter Klara, probably will. At any rate, that is what he hopes will happen. The short, closing paragraph of the novel declares: "The years - ten, perhaps more - he has left to live are his own. His and Linda's, his and Klara's; nobody else's."

This is not the end that Mankell's readers wanted for the hero of the Wallander series.

But all good things must come to an end; some of us acknowledge this, some of us don't.

Wallander himself is burdened by the sense of an ending. He reminds his daughter that "When you reach sixty, most of your life is behind you. You just have to accept that, hard though it is. There are very few important decisions still to be made."

But there are a few. Another novel - Michael Ignatieff's Booker-nominated Scar Tissue - identifies one of the "few important decisions" that Wallander has in mind. Ignatieff's novel features an academic whose mother is dying from Alzheimer's - coincidentally the very same illness with which Wallander is afflicted. As her life is ending, her son gets the impression that she is telling him there's nothing to be afraid of. In doing so, she is preparing her son for death. This is the last duty a parent has to his or her offspring. And it's a really hard one to fulfil. Wallander is terrified he won't prepare his daughter and grandaughter for death when the time comes. It is not death itself that torments him, but how he will meet it.

Image top: Palfest.