Fragments of Truth
An interview with Henning Mankell

Marika Bratt talks to Henning Mankell on his new thriller, Kennedy's Brain, recently released in Swedish.

Henning Mankell has arrived on the morning flight from New York. Later in the day he will be flying from Stockholm to Gothenburg, but first he has to attend some meetings and sign some books for sending to Germany. It's all go when he's at home in Sweden.

Henning Mankell settles down in the armchair, kicks off his shoes and puts his feet up on the sofa opposite. He's in the middle of finishing off his latest novel, Kennedy's Brain (Kennedys hjärna). In less than a week the text has to receive its final polish and be submitted to the printer.

It is a complicated story that has taken a lot of time and effort to write. And it has needed a lot of space.

— I think there is a craving for long stories. Nowadays we live in a Beef Stroganoff world where everything has to be sliced and shredded. But you can't describe reality in forty seconds.

He relies on his readers' patience. The plot is assembled piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle, and grows nastier and more claustrophobic by the page. It is impossible to say what is true and what is false until the final piece is in place.

— Writing this book has been an adventure.

In this novel he uses what he calls his savings account. His own experiences from Africa.

When the archaeologist Louise Cantor comes home to Sweden from a dig in Greece, she finds her son Henrik dead. There is nothing to suggest foul play, but Louise cannot accept what has happened. When the police tell her that the cause of death is an overdose of sleeping tablets, she is even more convinced that something is wrong. She cannot believe that her son would take his own life.

— It must be every parent's worst nightmare. A child of their's committing suicide.

Children should not outlive their parents, and they should not think that the world is so awful, they no longer want to live in it. The situation makes no sense as far as Louise is concerned. She cannot imagine what would make Henrik think like that. The police's line of argument sounds wrong to her.

Hidden under the surface
In the flat she finds material about the disappearance of President Kennedy's brain after his assassination in 1963. Why was her son interested in that?

— It's a true story. John F. Kennedy's brain really did disappear and was never found again. We don't know how nor why. Perhaps it was sheer carelessness. Or did somebody think that one day in the future it might be possible to extract information from a dead man's brain? If so, what do people want to hide? The story is symbolic for what we don't know. What is kept concealed from us.

It sounds preposterous. But over and over again the story shows us how wrong we are when we think we know what is possible.

Louise sets about finding the answers to her questions in the way that comes naturally to her as an archaeologist.

— She tries to understand what has happened by examining fragments of information. That's what archaeologists do, after all. They interpret clues from the past and try to recreate what something looked like and how it worked. You have to put little things in the context of the big picture. The whole can be explained by means of the details.

But which pieces of information are important and which are misleading? Nowadays it is increasingly difficult to pick out relevant points from the flood of information that flows over us.

— We are constantly being pelted with a deluge of pseudo-information. I notice that when I'm in Mozambique. There is one television station, a few newspapers and a handful of radio channels. You might think that I am remote from the flood of news. But when I come to Sweden I notice that I haven't missed anything. Possibly a bit of local news, but I can follow all the big questions just as well in Africa.

He has detected a development in Sweden that he finds disturbing.

— The evening newspapers have been turned into television supplements. All the news is about celebrities and stars of reality programmes. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if before long one of the television companies goes the whole hog and buys one of the evening newspapers. That would give them another outlet to their target audience.

Aids divides the world
When Louise tries to piece together the bits of information she discovers, she is forced to question things she thought she knew about her son. When she meets her son's friends they describe a young man she doesn't wholly recognise. The trail takes her first to Barcelona, where it transpires that Henrik has a flat. How could he have afforded that?

Louise grows more and more unsure. Has her son been involved in some criminal activity or other, or has he been a victim of knowing something that others want to keep secret? The information she uncovers does not yield a clear picture. The pieces do not fit together.

When she follows in Henrik's footsteps she finds terrifying material about Aids and HIV. Articles about blackmailing those infected, and the testing of drugs on unsuspecting peasants in the Chinese countryside. Companies that vanish without trace when side effects devastate patients.

— This material is there for anybody interested enough to seek it out. The problem is that it doesn't reach a wider public. It seems to be more important to write about whoever goes off to the jungle to take part in I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here than to inform people about sick and poverty-stricken people in distant parts of the world.

These are questions that upset Henning Mankell. Aids has become an illness that divides the world into them and us. In the rich part of the world, anti-retro-viral drugs have meant that HIV has started to be regarded as a chronic ailment. The virus can be kept in check, and those afflicted can live for a long time without symptoms. This has encouraged the western world to start shrugging off the problem. We think that Aids is under control. The situation in Africa is different. There, HIV is fatal, and those afflicted have few possibilities of getting help.

— Our contribution in this area is appallingly tiny. The struggle between humans and viruses is eternal. We can't allow the world to be divided up into them and us. As far as Aids is concerned, there should be nothing but us. Those afflicted have to be provided with resources.

Half truths become lies
Louise's journeys in the footsteps of her son take her to Mozambique and a hospice for the poverty-stricken. Here care is provided for those who are not going to survive. Volunteers take care of Aids patients during their last days on this earth. But is everything what it seems? Who is the man behind these villages for dying people? A rich man who has decided to spend his enormous fortune on doing good, or a man who owns secret laboratories with the aim of being the first to find a cure? To find the vaccine that will produce untold riches for whoever is the first to discover it.

While a vaccine is still being sought, myths are spread. The most horrific is no doubt that sex with a child will result in a cure.

— Magic solutions and incantations are what people will turn to until there is something better. But we shouldn't beat our breasts. Our own superstitions are only just beneath the surface. Just think about what Swedes believed a hundred years ago, or even today. There is no way of proving that magnets or crystals will work. But when people are desperate, they are prepared to try anything.

This book was written in anger. Fury over what the world looks like, and how little a human life is worth. But it is not propaganda. It is in fact incredibly tense, and readers have a feeling of disturbing insecurity that increases as the book develops. What is true? What is false? Who is friend, who is foe? Louise feels more and more threatened, and by the end she is in retreat.

The fury Mankell writes about is simmering in the background. Henrik's girlfriend, Lucinda, says that most white people care about how Africans die — we don't need to know anything about how they live because that is incidental. There is the ring of truth about that. The news we hear about Africa is about catastrophes, diseases and countries torn apart by civil war.

— That is a disgraceful betrayal on the part of the media. What we are told is half truths that combine to form a gigantic lie, when they are repeated time after time. There isn't just one Africa. There are 50 countries, and about 45 of them are at peace. But the myth gives us an excuse not to bother about Africa.

Nevertheless, he is hopeful. It is true that the continent will continue to be backward for some time yet. But positive forces are at work. The most important one being education.

— I am convinced that Mozambique will be a rich country a hundred years from now. I would love to see it, I really would. I suppose I'll have to do a bit of horse trading with the gods to ensure that I can have a glimpse of it.

He smiles as he says it, but he doesn't say which gods he thinks he will be dealing with.

Written by Marika Bratt

This interview was first published in Swedish in Bokia Magazine. English translation is made by Laurie Thompson.

Updated: June 15, 2005.