Henning Mankell is a prime example of ‘homo narrans’, the
storytelling animal. With a totally sold out RBS Main Theatre at the Book
Festival, he is also a very popular author, who has written 40 novels and 25
plays, and given the world Wallander, the grumpy policeman from Ystad.
Mankell’s life blood is telling stories, and he showed the audience, who had
all left a gloriously warm and sunny Edinburgh day behind them to listen to
him, what a great performer he really is.
Mankell kicked off by saying that he is intrigued by the
city of Edinburgh, because when he visited the festival for the first time ten
years ago he got terribly lost and almost didn’t make his appearance with Ian
Rankin. And this time, his second visit, he got stuck in a elevator.
Perhaps it’s fair to say that Mankell is best known in the
UK for his crime fiction, but of his big body of work only a quarter falls
under that category. He’s written political plays, children’s books, and
produced theatre plays, and turned out to be quite a complex and experienced
person. That being said, he does recognise crime fiction as one of the oldest
literary traditions.
“When people ask me what is my inspiration,” Mankell said,
“I always say, with hand on my heart, the ancient Greek drama. If you take a
play like Medea, written more than 2,000 years ago, what is Medea about? It is
a woman who kills her two children because of jealousy. If that is not a crime
story, I don’t what a crime stoty is.”
And the best crime story Mankell has ever read is Macbeth.
“The difference from that time to our time,” he explained,
“is the existance of a policeman. Writers have always understood to use crime
as a form to talk about society and about human beings. It’s a very efficient
way of telling a story.”
At one point Mankell stopped at the sound of a mobile phone
ringing.
“That’s Mozart,” he said instantly, “Turkish March.” And
continued his show as if nothing had happened. This was a lecture rather than the
normal Book Festival Q&A ,following the author reading 15-20 minutes from
his latests work. Mankell didn’t read a word, which made this event much more
enjoyable and spontaneous. At some point he jumped up from his plastic chair
and acted out a story from Mozambique about a policeman having his shoes
polished while his apprehended criminal is waiting at his side. Then he
described the strangest place he had ever written – on a kitchen floor by the
light of an open oven, and the typewriter placed on the oven door, in an empty
flat in Stockholm. He told the moving story of an eleven-year-old AIDS-orphaned
African girl holding out her small pamphlet with memories of the mother she
never knew.
Mankell is also a passionate campaigner for Africa and
Palestine. He has donated money to set up a children’s village in Mozambique.
He has been coming back to Africa the last 35 years, and still spends half the
year there.
“I think my my African experiences have made me a better
European, in a way, because I got a distance to Europe,” Mankell said, and
added that it also enabled him to see the world in a more clear context.
He will also be on a ship destined for Palestine, carrying
aid for the Palestinian people, who live in a situation that Mankell said he
had seen before: Apartheid in South Africa.
“We have to help these people, because they are in a
terrible situation. The action defines the word, it’s not the word that defines
the action.”