The Mean Streets

*Kennedy’s Brain

by Henning Mankell

The New Press $26.95

ISBN 978-1-59558-184-6                             

October 2007                                                 

*Full Review first published in Mystery News (December/January 2008)

Henning Mankell is a star of the first magnitude. As such he can afford to take the kind of chances that he does here in the pages of this powerful but, ultimately, less than completely satisfying novel. Don’t get me wrong. Mankell’s prose still possesses the same chilly rigor that it usually does. In fact, he is nearly unparalleled as a stylist. At the same time, and although the author’s plotting is generally as elegant and as precise as a laser sculpture, when all is said and done, Kennedy’s Brain is episodic, meandering and, at times, almost incomprehensible.

Louise Cantor is an archeologist working on a dig in Greece. She returns to her native Sweden for an academic conference only to discover her twenty-eight-year-old son, Henrik, dead in his bed. The authorities rule the young man’s death a suicide but Louise suspects foul play. As the grief-stricken mother begins to put together the pieces of her son’s final days – in much the same way she is accustomed to re-assembling the shattered pieces of Attic pottery discovered in the ancient soil of Greece – she is confronted by strata upon strata of disinformation, conflicting data as well as the disturbing truth concerning Henrik’s HIV-positive status and his quest for the truth behind the causes of the global AIDS epidemic. In the end Cantor’s quest takes her to Mozambique and to a sinister hospice for those suffering from “the virus.” What Louise discovers is so macabre and so nefarious as to be almost unimaginable: “’Medicines are raw materials that can be just as valuable as rare metals or jewels. That’s why there is no limit to what people are prepared to do, in the name of greed’.”

As might be expected, Mankell creates rich characters with genuine emotions and with whom the reader cannot help but sympathize. All the same, the motivation fueling them in this story is murky at best. Louise, to be sure, is driven by grief. But quite what motivated Henrik’s often rather obscure actions is never fully elaborated. As mother retraces the desultory steps of the son it becomes a classic example of the blind leading the blind. Add to that the fact that, after 300+ pages, the story reaches no discernable conclusion and, well, frustration at what might have been is inevitable.

The search to establish the reality of the alleged disappearance of President John F. Kennedy’s brain after his assassination – one of Henrik’s pet obsessions – becomes a symbol in the book for the young man’s ultimately futile efforts to shed light on what he comes to believe is a global AIDS conspiracy. It thus also becomes a symbol for Louise’s quest to make sense of her son’s death. If you are confused by all of this, take heart; so am I. And I have the book right in front of me! The whole thing is a wonderful conceit but, in practical terms, it simply adds yet another layer of complexity, confusion and imponderability to a story that already has more than its share of each of those things. Either something (literally!) has been lost in the translation here or Mankell’s emotional involvement with his topic – the AIDS epidemic in Africa – gets the best of him at times and overmasters both his artistic sense as well as his immense skill asa novelist.

All of that aside, the author still creates a strong sense of place, both in terms of his native Sweden as well as with regard to the tropical climate of his adopted country of Mozambique. Marvelous characters abound and there are scenes in Kennedy’s Brain that, among the best Mankell has ever written, run the gamut from the ineffably poignant to the utterly hideous: “In the huts they were hit by the stifling smell of urine and excrement: patients were lying about on stretchers and raffia mats on the ground. Louise had trouble making out faces. All she registered was glinting eyes, groans and the smell … It was like sinking down through the centuries and entering a room full of slaves waiting to be transported … ‘Now I am wandering with Virgil and Dante through the kingdom of death’.”

By no stretch of the imagination is Kennedy’s Brain “vintage” Henning Mankell. In the end, however, it’s still Henning Mankell. For that reason, and despite its flaws, this is still an important novel and still one that is well worth reading.

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this

• #1 Comment from scatrdfew
  3/10/08 10:26 PM | Permalink

  This was my first Mankell experience... and will be my last. To say there are holes in this plot is a gross understatement. I forced myself to finish reading it hoping it would get better. No such luck.