The White Lioness (1993)

I liked a lot of things about this Kurt Wallander story by Henning Mankell, though its scope and size put it more in the range of big-time bestseller thriller than police procedural. We've already seen Mankell's ambitions to transcend genre limitations, not least by giving them such deeply international themes and concerns. The previous novel, The Dogs of Riga, involved the reunification of Germany and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. This one involves South Africa at the end of apartheid—in fact, it is about an assassination attempt on Nelson Mandela. I'm not sure I like such high-profile goings-on going on in my tidy little police procedurals, but Mankell was a part-time resident and lifelong student of South Africa, so he comes by it honestly. Mankell demonstrates again, more emphatically than ever, that he is a positive master at orchestrating plot. From the disappearance of a young wife and mother in southern Sweden, and back and forth to the highest echelons of South African power, Mankell puts the police detective Wallander on the case, which includes a disaffected high-level KGB agent, two African assassins with varying spiritual inclinations, a handful of Communist stooges, President F.W. de Klerk himself, brutal white supremacists of course, a Methodist minister, and Wallander's own daughter. There's plenty of mortal danger to go around and the stakes are very high. I never believed we were in South African history, though South Africa itself was quite believable, including de Klerk, often seen burning the midnight oil in the spring of 1992, when this novel takes place. The White Lioness was never published in English until 1998 so it might have already been easy to miss the scorching immediacy of the historical moment and context Mankell worked in—practically a tightrope act. The transition was still ongoing in 1993 and still could have gone wrong even as he was writing. An assassination of Mandela was hardly unlikely—where would Mankell have been then? As I say, the 500 pages of The White Lioness add up to thriller more than anything else. I often thought of Robert Ludlum as I wended along through all these meticulously constructed events. Kurt Wallander is interesting and likable, gruff but ploddingly competent, with inspired intuition and fierce commitment. He's hot-tempered, a little bit foolish, but a lot wise. He's a heroic figure and there are others like him here, who recognize one another. Well, it's genre. The bad people are in the mold of German Nazis. So it works for the most part, and works pretty well, but may lean toward the mechanical and indulgent by size. It will probably keep you up most of the night if you let it.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.