THE MAN FROM BEIJING
Henry Mankell
Knopf/Harvill Secker

The publishers kindly sent me a reading copy of this new title from Henning Mankell. I was looking forward to reading it, after all this is the writer who created Inspector Wallander played by Kenneth Branagh in the television series, but there was something about the book that didn't quite work for me. I couldn't figure out quite what it was about it that troubled me when I came across the following review in The Economist, Jan.23-29, 2010 and I thought aha.
Here it is for your interest:

HENNING MANKELL, the Swedish creator of the Inspector Wallander mysteries, which have been cast to perfection for television this year with Kenneth Branagh in the main role, is part August Strindberg, part Stieg Larsson. His new work, “The Man from Beijing”, which features a middle-aged former Maoist turned honest Swedish judge, Birgitta Roslin, as the central character, contains much of Larsson’s hysteria about Sweden’s dark side with a generous helping of Strindberg’s wintry musicality. At least that’s how Mr Mankell’s new book starts, which is all to the good.

A lone male wolf crosses the unmarked border between Sweden and Norway in search of food, Mr Mankell writes. His last meal was a dead moose, devoured several days before. The wolf approaches a village, and smells blood. There is a carcass nearby, which he drags back into the trees. It is not yet frozen. He is even hungrier now. He pulls off a leather shoe and starts gnawing at an ankle.
This frozen panorama is the door to a bloody crime, and to a far broader narrative. It turns out that an entire village has been massacred, seemingly by one person. In Swedish history, Mr Mankell comments, such a crime is unprecedented and it attracts journalists from all over the world.
Reading about the killings in the newspapers, Judge Roslin recognises one of the family names involved as belonging to an elderly couple, now among the dead, who had helped raise her mother. Diagnosed with high blood pressure, Judge Roslin is conveniently given several weeks’ leave from the courts which she uses to try and solve the crime.

China, as can be expected from the book’s title, becomes the focal point of two separate narratives here. One is a 19th-century story of forced emigration from the Middle Kingdom and the other a parable about the future direction of modern China. Should China adhere to Chairman Mao’s higher ideals, and work towards bridging the gap between rich and poor, or should it be every man for himself? Mr Mankell lives partly in Mozambique, where he spends much of his free time working with AIDS charities, so, inevitably, he also begins to ruminate here on China’s role in Africa. Are the Chinese just new colonialists, or can they really be true partners with younger, smaller, poorer African nations?

Mr Mankell is a master portraitist of Sweden’s underside. It is when his novel turns to social commentary abroad that the trouble starts. The picture he paints of Africa—with a leopard calmly surveying the world from its grassy hillock—is clichéd enough, but his China is positively hackneyed. Shadowy men of power and wealth inhabit newly built skyscrapers. When they do speak, which isn’t often, it is in long stilted phrases about the wisdom of the ancients. The apotheosis of this is a speech, by a member of the Chinese politburo, which goes on, unedited, for ten whole pages.

In an afterword, Mr Mankell acknowledges the need to “correctly present important details”. The problem is that he makes rather a meal of both the details and the presentation. “The Man from Beijing” is half chewed, if not nigh on indigestible.