“A Shadow Had Descended Upon His Existence”: Alzheimer’s in Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man

PRINT

This is the fifth and final article in a series guest edited by Bruce Robbins. Some years into the fashion, Nordic noir remains something of a mystery. Known for its pronounced left-wing tendencies and an uncompromisingly critical view of the Scandinavian welfare state, the genre has won huge audiences in a global climate of neoliberalism and among fiction, film, and television audiences abroad that do not seem to share the social and political assumptions of the region. But perhaps we have been too hasty in identifying those assumptions and their meaning in the countries of origin. The essays gathered here, from inside and outside Scandinavia, try to consider this enormously successful cultural export with fresh eyes, reflecting anew on why Nordic noir should have emerged where and when it did and on the gender and eco-political concerns as well as the concern with the welfare state that have animated its cross-cultural creativity.

In Den orolige mannen (The Troubled Man 2009/2011), the ninth and final novel about Kurt Wallander, one of contemporary world literature's most compelling and bestselling police detectives, Henning Mankell lets his charismatic and already burned-out protagonist suffer the agony of early-onset Alzheimer's. Whatever else the disease is, it is also a metaphor.  "[T]he foundation of the welfare state is no longer intact," Mankell had written in Pyramiden (The Pyramid, 1999/2008),1 anticipating the 2003 argument of Slavoj Žižek about how the  series traces the decline of the welfare state under neoliberalism. Wallander's bodily decay, announced by a sequence of blackouts and culminating in Alzheimer's, offers symptoms of that same crisis of crumbling solidarity and increasing egotism.

Yet The Troubled Man ends with a certain political evolution.  As he remarks that "a shadow had descended upon his existence,"2 he also  awakens from his life-long "political apathy"3. All his life, we are told, "The only things that were of any interest to him were lower taxes and higher wages, nothing else"4. Now, as he approaches his end, he chooses political engagement, deciding to write and publish a book about the political hypocrisies he has discovered in the course of the investigation that makes up the novel: basically, that the USA conducted secret operations on Swedish territory and committed murder to cover up its past and present activities. Even as he doubts (in the pre-Snowden world of the early 2000s) that anyone would want to ruin the good relationship between the USA and Sweden, the likely result of disclosing his knowledge, he seeks to perfect his presentation of what he knows. In this, he resembles the novelist who created him: "Wallander was particularly concerned about how to make sure that the summary of his thoughts and the knowledge he had acquired would become public"5

As has often been noted, literary narratives typically aim to put us in the shoes of others, sharing their experiences and thus also their feelings. But empathy is equally important in other lines of professional work, very much including that of the  detective. The detective must be able to imaginatively take up the position of the criminal as well as the victim. This seems to be one readerly attraction of detective fiction: we try to be better than, or at least as good as, the detective in exercising this empathetic skill, putting ourselves in the place of all the characters, including the detective himself, who often sacrifices everything to solve the case. In The Troubled Man, the key activity uniting us with Wallander is thematized by Wallander himself:

A few years ago he bought a book about a crime committed ... in the early nineteenth century. As he read it, he became increasingly involved, and had the distinct feeling that he could have entered the story and together with the county sheriff and prosecutor worked out how the victims, man and woman, had been murdered... Nowadays they had superior technical means of establishing evidence, but the ability to interpret what you see with your own eyes was still the key to police work.6

There's an instructive manual here about how to read detective fiction.

This self-consciousness contributes to the special appeal of Kurt Wallander. While we care about the solution of the crime, we also care for him, as a reader like ourselves, in a way that is separate from, and maybe even contrary to the way we care about the solution to the crime. As Andrew Nestigen puts it in the best critical work on Wallander: "Mankell shifts away from the narrative desire typical for crime fiction - investigation and disclosure - yet maintains crime fiction's tension by substituting a narrative desire focused on the affective state of the protagonist."7 This analysis applies very nicely to The Troubled Man, which barely refers to a crime or investigates it. Instead, Wallander himself becomes the center of attention. Though the title ostensibly refers to Håkan von Enke, the character (involved in dubious Cold War espionage) who goes missing and ignites the detective plot, it is Wallander who is the novel's true "troubled man." The most salient outcome of Wallander's investigation is his own  political awakening, when he writes a book calling public attention to dark geopolitical truths. But that public narrative is also "in fact a sort of 'life story,' a testament"8 in which Wallander takes center stage. On one hand, his body allegorizes the state's decline and failing memory. On the other, his book encourages the reader to see the need for societal renewal.

The Troubled Man is an atypical Wallander novel in a number of ways. He is off-duty when investigating von Enke's disappearance. This is a version of the common detective fiction trope of the retired or suspended police detective who is nonetheless unable to refrain from action. What is special, however, is that in this novel Wallander is preparing for his retirement, which is something he's absolutely not ready for. The novel opens with Wallander making a mistake that might oblige him to retire: he forgets his gun at a restaurant. Just thinking about retirement makes him throw an apple against the wall and shout at his daughter Linda, who warns him against isolation and loneliness: "'You've just said that my problem is loneliness!' he roared. 'What would it be like if I was forced to retire? I'd have nothing at all left.'"9 The devastating existential truth of this "nothing at all" haunts the entire novel, which increasingly points us to Wallander's "forced" retirement (forced in the sense that he'd rather not retire even as reasons of health compel him to). The novel in fact gives him something to retire for, his granddaughter Klara. At the end of the novel, having finished his book, he "did wonder, with an empty feeling deep inside himself, what he would do after retiring as a police officer. There was only one answer, and that was Klara. Her presence always cheered him up. She would be there for him when everything else was over"10. However, the novel also takes away this object of meaningfulness and gives him, in a chilling sense, "nothing at all" when it gives him Alzheimer's disease.

That Wallander has moved to the center of the plot is evident from the fact that it is hard to figure out what the crime is supposed to be. His daughter's father-in-law, Håkan von Enke, a retired submarine captain, former Cold Warrior and high-ranking officer in the Swedish Defence, disappears under mysterious circumstances. In his spare time (he's been suspended), Wallander gets involved in this case, which is not yet a crime proper. Indeed, not until the middle of the novel do we get a crime to solve when Håkan's wife, Louise, who had also suddenly gone missing, turns up dead with microfilms of classified documents in her purse. It looks like suicide, but Wallander figures out that it's probably murder. He thinks the Russians did it to protect their operations and prevent Louise from getting caught, but it turns out to have been the Americans, for whom Håkan spied, and who don't want their old Cold War operations revealed even now after the Wall has fallen. Wallander had been fooled into thinking both that Louise was a Russian spy and that Håkan feared the Russians were after him; Håkan was actually an American spy all the time and Louise was on his trail and therefore had to be eliminated to cover up the Americans' covert operations on neutral territory.

But none of this is really central. The center here is Wallander himself.  Wallander is troubled, as usual, by the decline of the welfare state and its old solidarities, which have lost out to the globalized, neoliberal world and its new forms of crime and egotism. In The Dogs of Riga, Sweden was described as a "worn-out or at least partially demolished paradise."11 As Mankell himself later put it in the Foreword to The Pyramid, Wallander "has in a way served as a kind of mouthpiece for growing insecurity, anger, and healthy insights about the relationship between the welfare state and democracy"12. Insecurity, anxiety, trouble are also evident in Wallander's personal life: he is divorced and his ex-wife, Mona, is an alcoholic who blames him for her personal disarray. He has a problematic relationship to his daughter, Linda, who breaks with traditional gender roles and is a worrisome maverick, like her father. Wallander is finally also troubled by his health and by the onset of old age, both of which terrify him. Lying awake late at night talking to himself, he thinks of death - as usual - and makes a self-diagnosis:

"Kurt Wallander is lying in his bed, thinking of death," he said aloud to himself. It was true. He really was thinking of death. But he often did that. Ever since he was a young police officer, death had always been present in his life. He saw it in the mirror every morning. But now, when he couldn't sleep, it crept up very close to him. He was sixty years old, a diabetic, slightly overweight. He didn't pay as much attention to his health as he should, didn't exercise enough, drank too much, ate what he shouldn't, and at irregular times.13

He takes a lot of medicine, seven different pills, something he keeps secret from his daughter14. Most troubling of all, he suffers from sudden losses of memory, blackouts that last longer and longer and occur with increasing frequency. He lies to his own doctor about his anxieties regarding these memory losses and he sees another doctor, who claims to be an expert on "the problems of old age." He asks her if she thinks he has Alzheimer's. She humours him by saying "no" on the medically dubious ground of a single consultation though, as she puts it, "nobody knows what's lurking round the next corner."15

When I said there was hardly a crime proper until far into the novel, it wasn't entirely true. The novel opens with a kind of crime when Wallander, drunk but not too drunk, forgets his gun at a restaurant and then forgets that he has forgotten it. He is put on forced vacation and later suspended for the duration of an internal investigation. This is the crime that calls our attention to Wallander as the affective center of this novel. Wallander is troubled citizen, burned-out detective, stressed suspect and suffering patient all at once.   The combination of these roles draws the reader's sympathy.  This is how the forgetting of the gun is rendered:

... there was something affecting him much more deeply than having been drunk. Another sort of forgetfulness that he didn't recognise. A darkness in which he could find no lamps to light... A shadow had descended over his existence. How had he not even missed the gun when he woke up? It was as if somebody else had been acting in his stead, and then had switched off his memory so that he wouldn't know what had happened.16

This "darkness" is another version of the blackness of Nordic noir: the lurking sense of being alienated from oneself that is contingent on the disease, "as if somebody else had been acting in his stead." To irreversibly lose a sense of agency is one of the things we fear most about this disease, and also about a certain form of social life. A number of such scenes occur through the narrative.17 In one of them, Wallander goes out walking, having left the stove on. He nearly starts a fire. The firemen show up and ask: "How careless can a detective get?"18 Needless to say, it's problematic when a detective loses his memory and his ability to function as an autonomous agent - even if (as the series reminds us) working for a large bureaucracy always entailed a certain potential sacrifice of agency. After the stove incident he confesses to Linda: "'Sometimes whole chunks of time just disappear. Like ice melting away'."19 The metaphor captures the unsettling experience of fluidity and evaporation experienced by Wallander, who is used to a rational and stable "cool" personality to anchor his investigations. In reference to another incident he says: "'I suddenly had no idea why I was there. It was like being in a brightly lit room when somebody turns off the light, without warning. I don't know how long I was in pitch darkness. It was as if I didn't even know who I was any more'."20 The scariest thing about Alzheimer's is surely this fearful anticipation of a future in which one will no longer even recognize what one has lost.   In the end the attacks of forgetfulness become almost routine: riding a train "what he always dreaded nowadays happened. He suddenly had no idea where he was going. He had to check his ticket in order to remember. His shirt was soaked in sweat after this attack of forgetfulness."21 He still knows what a train ticket is and what it's for, but things are pointing in a certain direction. Yet nothing prepares us for the devastating end that approaches.

The Troubled Man is unusual not just because the crime is out of focus, but also because Wallander is allowed to have a positive experience of "great joy,"22 which happens after Linda tells him she is pregnant. This is unusual for Wallander: he rarely smiles or laughs. When he learns that his granddaughter has been born, he even cries: "The feeling took him by surprise, and for a while he was utterly defenceless."23 Indeed, the pleasurable feelings of grandfatherhood make up a new aspect of this novel. There is now time and energy to do some of the things he regrets he didn't do with his own young child, and we may sentimentally dare to anticipate a plot of redemption and reconciliation where Wallander escapes the fate of his own father (deep solitude and bitterness, alienated from his son) and experiences a richer and more meaningful old age. Given the tendency to allegorize the fate of Wallander as the fate of the welfare state, we may hope for societal renewal and continued progress. This makes the novel's actual ending all the more devastating. Talking with Linda, who is visiting with Wallander's "great joy," his sleeping granddaughter Klara, Wallander admits to being "scared stiff of growing old":24

Linda stayed for several hours. They talked until Klara woke up, and with a broad smile on her face she ran over to Wallander.

Wallander suddenly felt terrified. His memory had deserted him again. He didn't know who the girl running towards him was. He knew he'd seen her before, but what her name was or what she was doing in his house he had no idea.

It was as if everything had fallen silent. As if all colours had faded away, and all he was left with was black and white.25

Narratologically, we are at the moment of culmination, where - especially in the form of crime fiction - we expect and desire that matters will be resolved. Instead of everything making sense, we end with a complete loss of sense. This is chilling closure indeed. Following this bleak but expected (and in a sense inevitable) end, the narrator makes sure that no reader will be on the look-out for more Wallander novels:

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.

After that there is nothing more. The story of Kurt Wallander is finished, once and for all. The years - ten, perhaps more - he has left are his own. His and Linda's, his and Klara's; nobody else's.26

It is almost as if the nothingness of Alzheimer's disease is the real criminal, named only here at the end, and Wallander is the innocent patient-victim rather than the powerful police investigator we came to know. The mystery has been solved, though it has led away from the crime that was under investigation.

From the point of view of the Swedish welfare state's self-understanding, one might say that the real victim here is Linda. She (not her partner, the capitalist banker Hans) is singled out as primary caregiver for her Alzheimer-afflicted father.  This is inevitable not because of the natural course of aging and disease, but because of a future where the institutions and solidarities of the welfare state have crumbled, as we see throughout the Wallander series. Thus, the family must be reinvented as the place to care for the elderly, and women must be brought back home from the work place to take care of dependent family members, young and the old. Linda, who is the independent protagonist of other Mankell novels, is often seen as his version of the female mavericks so characteristic of Nordic noir, such as Lisbeth Salander and Saga Norén: emancipated and progressive products of the egalitarian welfare state. Linda is no stay-at-home mom: she can't wait to finish her maternity leave and get back to work.27 To make her give up her independent identity as agent of her own destiny would be to kill her off, as if in another weird phantasmatic crime hinted at by the novel. In the early Wallander novels such as Faceless Killers and The Dogs of Riga, Wallander's own father also developed Alzheimer's and confronted his son with the dilemma of whether to care for the state or the family. The welfare state stepped in and took care of the family, rather prosaically through homecare service, and (to the relief of all readers) allowed the son to solve crimes and take care of the security of the state. The Troubled Man and the book about himself and big politics that Kurt Wallander writes in the end raise the question that they cannot themselves answer: who will take care of the old and the infirm? That is to say, who will take care of us in an insecure future after the death of the welfare state?

Peter Simonsen is Professor of European Literature at the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the head of a research group in Welfare Narratives and has published on British Romanticism and contemporary Scandinavian fiction in relation to the welfare state.

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

Bruce Robbins, "The Detective is Suspended: Nordic Noir and the Welfare State"

Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, "The Policeman in the Ill-Fitting Uniform; or, How to Write Crime Fiction After Utøya"

Anne-Marie Mai, "Eco-Crime: Scandinavian Literature Takes on the Environmental Crisis."

Yvonne Leffler, "Lisbeth Salander as Pippi Longstocking"