In October 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Sweden was still a neutral state. Nevertheless, in order to counteract, in case of necessity, the military actions of Russia and Germany, which were fighting against each other in the Baltic region, the authorities decided to start a series of preparations, on a strictly technical level at first. So that Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, an officer in the Swedish Navy, was assigned on a secret mission that consisted in taking depth soundings of particular maritime routes around the Östergötland archipelago in order to determine if, should the need arise, the big military ships could sail there. However, the man would also discover, alongside the impressive depths of the sea, the dark abyss within his own soul.
These are some of the key elements of „Djup” („Depths”), the novel written by the Swedish writer Henning Mankell. Published in 2004 and regarded as one of his most important pieces of fiction, this text, profoundly introspective, many a time sombre and by no means devoid of a typically Scandinavian pessimism about the human condition, faces the reader with an atmospheric narration oftentimes compared by exegetes to the great epic poems of Scandinavia and to the peculiar ethos of this cultural space.
Born in 1948, having made his debut in theatre in the early 1970s and having subsequently become an essayist and an author of children’s literature, Mankell published his first novel in 1973, but he effectively gained acclaim (both in Europe and across the Ocean!) upon the publication of the Kurt Wallander Mystery Series – a sequence of detective novels centred on Kurt Wallander, the resourceful detective capable of unfailingly unravelling the most complicated cases and of clarifying all mysteries. And if Wallander wants to clarify the mysteries (and succeeds in doing it), the protagonist of „Depths” is trying to create new ones, shrouding his own existence in a veil of lies and of an ongoing conflict between appearance and essence, between what has indeed happened and what he claims has happened, thus substantiating the author’s assertion that the novel was “set on the – as yet insufficiently explored in contemporary literature – realm of the thin line that separates reality from imagination.”
For, having barely arrived in the archipelago, the protagonist seems to gradually immerse himself into a kind of universe that is falling out of seams, packed with sombre occurrences: the body of a German soldier is found drifting in the sea, Lieutenant Jakobsson, one of the officers on board of Svea, dies under unclear circumstances, another crew member falls sick and sub-lieutenant Welander, who has given in to intemperate drinking, is discharged from the ship. But, amidst all these events, on the rocky and apparently desert Halsskär island in the region, Lars Tobiasson meets Sara Fredrika, a woman who lives by herself and who, against all odds, casts an ineluctable spell on the officer. In spite of his being married to Kristina, yet feeling at the same time ever more estranged from her and from their married life in Stockholm, Lars starts an affair with Sara but, incapable of sorting out the ever more complicated situation he is in, he begins weaving an authentic web of deception in which he hides his life, planning – completely in the dark at first – his future. Within a short while his existence becomes a genuine realm of double or multiple intentions, in which even the simplest gestures can harbinger the tragic events to come. In front of his wife he claims that he will be carrying on his secret missions, although he has been dismissed from the Navy and charged with espionage, while the version that he gives Sara is that his wife and daughter have died. But the events come tumbling one upon another and the protagonist can no longer keep under control his nerves or, what’s more, his violence, which erupts all of a sudden, upon his suspicion that Sara has been cheating on him with a young German deserter whom he kills, alleging, in order to explain his absence to her, that he has committed suicide.
And after this murder which, as he himself realizes, has been committed in cold blood, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman feels that everything starts crumbling around him and that he is losing his grip on his own existence. Imperceptibly, he starts descending into his own inner abyss, which becomes all the more engulfing once both Kristina and Sara confess to him that they are expecting. How long will the former officer be able to avoid the fall into this fathomless abyss? Which of the two women will he choose? Last but not least, what is the price to be paid, one way or another, for all of these lies, half-truths, distortions of reality and deceptions? What will this madness and this uncontrollable violence lead to?
In the same degree and somehow parallel to the development of the plot proper, the author depicts the sea world and the marine universe where everything unfolds, a peculiar world isolated in its own solitude and surrounded by its own quietude, and the novel thereby turns into an atmospheric writing in which, symbolically, the present-day violent behaviour of the protagonist is revealed to have been caused, albeit partially, by the way society has perceived him, by the lack of affection in his childhood, by the fact that he has always fallen prey to abuse, as he lacked noble ancestry and the necessary useful connections in the world of aristocracy into which he tried to make his way by marriage. Incapable of genuinely relating to the ones around him and lacking relational abilities, Lars seems, from the very start, doomed to fail and susceptible to isolation, his only refuge (and potential chance of salvation, which he will nevertheless miss) being his passion for high-depth marine measurements, the domain in which he had specialized.
The sullen Northern landscapes, the drenching rains and the heavy snowfalls, the polar night and the despair that it seems to cast upon the people are uniquely overwhelming in this novel – a sombre book even by the standards of Scandinavian literature, yet one utterly convincing and impressive in its tragic intensity. A book approaching with lucidity the stringent problems of the modern age, from the relation between truth and lie to that between failure and the lure of spiritual redemption (which will prove impossible to attain), but also one courageously assessing the impact of a long-drawn-out contemplation of physical and geographical depths upon an unstable human nature. Because Tobiasson-Svartman’s reclusive nature was, as he himself was convinced, a kind of abyss into which he feared that he might fall someday…
Henning Mankell masterfully created a tense, coherent narrative, keeping the suspense and inserting in the text a series of unexpected plot twists, such as the arrival on the faraway island of Kristina’s father and subsequently of Kristina herself, all of which make one read the text with bated breath from beginning to end. In terms of the story-line, neither should the dual structure of the text be overlooked, given the two – past/ present – timelines: because „Depths” begins with a fragment placed in 1937, in an asylum in which Kristina has been admitted for twenty-two years and where she is, according to medical reports, still ‘affectively unresponsive’ after twelve years in which she has no longer uttered a single word, despite her being aware that, years before, she had had a husband.
Proportionately, the Swedish writer placed everything against the highly complicated and convulsive backdrop of the historical events that marked that particular age, which he depicted in a great manner, furthermore tackling even the well-known Schlieffen Plan (Germany’s military strategy designated to conquer France and afterwards the whole of Europe), in order to demonstrate that, oftentimes, on the level of history – much less on the level of one’s personal history – there is absolutely no chance of planning everything infallibly. Just like the Nazi ideas were doomed to fail, so was Lars Tobiasson-Svartman’s existence doomed to turn into a chaos impossible to contain and to control, so that he would end up in isolation, forlorn in the archipelago which, still hiding yet unchartered depths, revealed to him the utter, ever deeper abyss of his own consciousness.
Henning Mankell, „Djup”/ „Depths”/ „Abis”, translation into Romanian and notes by Daniela Ionescu, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2020
Translated into English by Mirela Petraşcu
Sumar Literomania nr. 410-411 (2026)
Scrie un comentariu