(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
We meet a strange, mysterious man, 76 years of age and living on a remote farm in Härjedalen, Sweden. He is awake at night, sleeps during the day and has a watchdog named Shaka, named after the legendary South African Zulu king. The man has two passions: to puzzle, preferably a little complicated with many pieces and to dance tango, which he often does with the stuffed doll Esmeralda.
At first we do not know who this man is, but we realize that he is an important person. Later, after he is brutally murdered, it turns out that he is a retired policeman. We also learn before he dies that he has a story behind him, a story that made him scared, very scared.
A former colleague and the book's main character, Stefan Lindman in the Borås Police, becomes curious – and we realize after only 37 pages that we have a crime novel ahead of us (Henning Mankell has started writing in other genres as well) and we are glad that we have 369 pages left of it.
Indeed, Lindman is on sick leave because he has a tumor on his tongue and may be suffering from a malignant cancer – but police officers, at least the ones Henning Mankell knows, are like journalists, they are notoriously curious, they snoop around in other people's cases, in cases they strictly have nothing to do with. And thus they create stories, intrigue, blood trail and blind trail. And – that is – crime novels.
When Lindman finds a puzzle piece in a place it should not have been, he realizes the seriousness, he realizes that something serious has happened. This track he fails to displace from the sniffing nose say.
But the case turns out to be difficult to solve, and just when Lindman, who really has nothing to do with the case, is about to give up, an exceptionally beautiful woman appears. For a male reader, it must be legitimate to ask: Is it not always so? And the answer is: Yes, in books, but never / rarely (delete what does not fit) in reality. But this is fiction, not reality – so shit.
And why should it be so complicated to solve homicides in books? "The return of the dance teacher" is thus no exception, but whoever the killer is we will still know before we are halfway into the reading. This is really rare in crime novels and perhaps a weakness of this book. Because it takes a lot of a writer to hold on to the reader after the killer is revealed. The air somehow goes out of the balloon, again only the subject stands. But Mankell is a driven writer, a ring fox who obviously has more in stock. Much more. And a new puzzle must be added.
The motifs quickly prove to be political to the extent that events of the war and Nazi views of the last world war can be called politics in the fall of 1999, the time when the main act of this book takes place. Stefan Lindman does not believe Nazi views are political, but criminal.
It seems for a long time that the killer should also get rid of his crime, that he will be able to escape and erase his tracks. But by chance, which is not very well literary justified and becomes something artificial and constructed (which shows that this is art, not real life), this does not happen, and the tension recovers when a new murder is committed. Probably a new killer.
Is there any connection between the two murders? This is not only the readers and investigators who wonder, but also up to several of the book's characters. There is a fun kind of play between the narrator and the reader. Sometimes it feels as if we as readers know more than the narrator. However, it is not, it just works that way.
No secrets are revealed when it can be revealed that this goes as it often does in good crime novels – it draws to a close. For things are not exactly what they seem, the lies pile up, it starts to get as complicated as a puzzle with 3000 almost identical pieces. The tension increases, and more and more people get a murder motive.
The motives for participating in the investigation are also starting to get complicated. Private motifs become more professional. Some people are on sick leave, some are at work and some should keep their fingers out of the barrel, but can't. Lindman's cancer tumor, a trifle for anyone but Lindman himself, becomes a picture of what is happening on several levels in this story. Is it malignant? Has anything spread? How much? Is it incurable?
Despite a beautiful woman (the retired and murdered policeman's daughter), this is little about love and even less about the sea, but it is of course a lot – as it always does in crime novels – about death.
We who have been out one winter night before, who have read the occasional crime book, understand that when the killer is revealed as early as here – yes, then there is more than one owl in the moss, then you have to look a little to the side and look among the most unlikely to find accomplices. A skilled crime writer understands this, a skilled crime writer has also been out one winter night before, Henning Mankell has been out on a freezing cold November night in Sweden before – even though he currently lives mostly in Africa.
Now it should be said that I realized relatively early on who was the big villain in this book, but it may be due to chance or that I am a good reader. It is also not the case that the criterion of whether a crime novel is good or not rests on whether the reader reveals the villain before the investigators.
Sweden has been good at educating politically conscious crime writers (Sjöwall & Wahlöö, Jan Guillou and others). Henning Mankell has placed himself safely within this tradition. Some direct political book, however, it is difficult to see that "The Dance Teacher's Return" is, but I feel confident that the author can personally sign the following quote from a side character towards the end of the book:
"I never thought Nazism died with Hitler," she said. – People with evil thoughts, human contempt, racist, exist to an equal degree today. But they have different names, different methods. Today, no war is fought between armies on battlefields. The hatred towards them a contempt, is expressed in other ways, from below, one might say. This country, or Europe, is about to be blown to pieces from within by its contempt for weakness, the attacks on refugees, racism. I see it everywhere. And I wonder if we are really capable of offering sufficient resistance. "
If we are to read any political message from this book, it must be that Hitler's legacy, his Nazi and racist attitudes are not dead, an acknowledgment that it can be worth taking seriously. Beyond this, Henning Mankell has again written a sober and well-composed crime novel that it was very difficult to put into the bookshelf before the last sentence was read.
