Mankell and the Beasts

The other night I stopped reading The White Lioness by the Swedish author Henning Mankell, who I got into after seeing the first installment of “Wallander,” on Masterpiece Theater. Wallander is the name of his detective, Kurt Wallander, age 44, master sleuth and passionate advocate of full commitment to a case. He’s my kind of guy: He doesn’t work out; he drinks too much, and lives in a haphazard, slovenly manner. But when it comes to a case he is a Gila Monster: once he takes hold, you can’t shake him off. Anyway, I kept the last chapter of the novel till tomorrow, which I’ll read while my wife is up in Phoenix. I also wanted to fit in a movie later.
I am very impressed by Mankell’s writing; it has the same driving narrative force that, for example, Michael Connelly has as a storyteller. The White Lioness opens with the inexplicable killing of a woman, a real estate agent, who had stopped at a house to ask direction as she was lost looking for a house. She was shot in the forehead by some unknown assailant, a man who threw her body down a well. Wallander was utterly at a loss for a motive; the case became even more puzzling because the house was blown up as well and after the blast investigators found a black index finger on the ground, and inside the house they stumbled upon pieces of a pistol made only in South Africa. The reader finds out before Wallander that the person who shot the woman was a an ex-KGB agent working for some fascist network in South Africa who are plotting the assassination of Nelson Mandela who will soon become the President of South Africa in 1994. They want to kill him, which would cause chaos and violence, providing them an opportunity to take over the government and to declare that Apartheid will stay in force and the white minority will continue to rule the country. Eventually Wallander will be able to connect the dots but will take over 450 pages to do that as the plots twists and turns. The KGB agent proves to be formidable opponent, and he feels the same about Wallander who he originally scoffed at as a provincial policeman. All things considered, the novel was an exciting and entertaining read.
The movie I chose to see the night I put the book down was another of those obscure titles that I am fond of taking a chance on. This one was a fantasy type film called The Outlander, with Jim Caviezel, John Hurt, and Ron Pearlman, who is one of my favorite character actors. I had never heard of the film but the cast was appealing so I gave it a look-see. It was the ultimate derivative movie and a bizarre curiosity as such. For example, it combined elements of a medieval fantasy and extraterrestrial life forms, and a terrifying monster that was part Grendal from Beowulf and the scary creature in the Alien series; there was also an idea from King Kong, and other snippets from other movies, like the Banquet Hall drinking scene in the recent Beowulf movie and a magic sword comparable to Excalibur.
In the year 709 A.D. a space ship splashes to earth in a lake somewhere in Scandinavia and a lone survivor named Kanan (Caviezel) has to make his way on a strange planet although he looks like a normal human being. He is obviously from a distant and advanced civilization and speaks a foreign tongue. He is in touch with his home base and he has with him a gadget that instills in him (through one eye) the language and culture of the world he has landed in, which is pretty nifty and very convenient. He has also a powerful weapon, a ray gun of a sort, but he loses it when he is captured by the tribe of Vikings who live in the area. They don’t know what to make of this stranger (is he friend or foe?) but when a mysterious and ghoulish beast shows up that the locals don’t have the wherewithal to handle, Kanan comes in handy, for he not only knows about the beast, he brought it to earth. He had been on a mission to exterminate the beast and its kind on a planet his people wanted to control. In order to save itself the creature, like the lizard-like beast in Alien, snuck into the space craft ; it also managed to survive the crash. This particular ogre is more radioactive than the Alien, as he heats up when aroused to action and lights up like a Christmas tree fed by LSD. This was when Kanan came up with the King Kong idea: Let’s dig a huge, deep ditch, trap the creature, fill it with flammable material and light the fire and see what happens. Well, the plan succeeds, the beast falls into the pit, there is fireball created, but the beast arises from the flames more irritated than damaged in any way. Fire seems to be the element he dominates; it is coeval with his nature. Going back to the drawing board, Kanan comes up with another idea; he dives down to space craft at the bottom of the lake and brings to the surface some of the metal the craft is made out of, an extraterrestrial alloy, much stronger than what was then available to the Vikings. With that metal he fashions the sword, a truly magic weapon like that famous mythic sword, Excalibur. With it he slays the fire-breathing dragon that he had accidentally brought to earth. Unfortunately the king was killed during the earlier battles with the beast. But the tribe turns to Kanan as their new King and he wins the hand of the King’s daughter too, so all turns out well for the ‘Man Who Fell to Earth’ from ‘Father Sky.’
I couldn’t help but wonder what he did with that machine he used to adjust to his new environment? He could also still be in touch with his Homeland. But we never heard of this possibility again.
After the Orlando’s surprise win over Cleveland and LeBron James, I watched Valkyrie with Tom Cruise and a cast of old worthies. As far as I know, it did not do well at the box office and now I understand why; it is a listless costume drama with an ending familiar to every schoolboy which takes the punch out of film’s martyrdom at the end of the film.. Other than the opening sequence in the African desert, where Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) suffers his injuries, the loss of his right hand, left eye, and two fingers off his surviving hand, the film is by and large a bunch of talking heads working on a conspiracy that somehow did not add up to suspense or high drama. The director also underworked the Colonel’s relation with his family; it would have helped to know them longer or better. They were just pawns to establish he had a family. The whole thing just fell flat and the public sniffed it out. There should have been a better way to tell the story that would have had more emotional weigh and impact. All the conspirators were summarily shot as soon as it was understood Hitler was still alive. Nine months later Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. I didn’t know this but there were 15 attempts to assassinate Hitler. It was a shame too, as a lot of people died during those nine months. But that all seems part of the nihilism that made up Hitler’s life and death.
By the way, Wallander and his associates foil the plot to kill Mandela, but just barely. Wallander outduels the Russian and two South African security agents seize the shooter just as he got off a bad shot.