I'm Back!

 I've had a health issue which involved a hospital stay. It's all good now and while it'll take some weeks for me to be completely back to normal - I'm still crashing for a couple of hours sleep every afternoon - I'm starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Because I'm supposed to be resting I've been doing a lot of reading, much of it rereads. 

I started out with a reread of Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. I've talked about this book before and if you happened to miss that it's about precolonial Australian indigenous society which was far more complex than my generation was taught about in school. Using the journals and other writings of the first Europeans here - settlers and explorers - Pascoe exposes the lie that was terra nullius, the claim by the British government of the time that the land belonged to no-one. According to this the inhabitants were primitive hunter gatherers who wandered around in search of game and therefore had no claim to the land. It's now clear this was not true. While it was very different from that of Europe the people here had a complex society, including trade, aquaculture, land management practices where individual groups had responsibility for particular areas and which had created the park-like landscapes that all newcomers commented on (and have now vanished), established villages in many areas, and, not least, they harvested and stored large quantities of different plants for food. 

Along with Dark Emu which is a very easy read I've been rereading Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth which is also about Aboriginal precolonial land management but in a more academic form and is equally fascinating. 

When I needed a break from non-fiction - I was dipping into a history of textile making at the same time - I got an urge to read a bit of Scandinavian crime. I decided on another reread - Faceless Killers, the first book in the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell about a police officer in the small town of Ystad in southern Sweden. I had a couple of other books from the series on my Kindle - The Dogs of Riga and The Fifth Woman - and realised that although I had watched both the Swedish and British series of the novels I hadn't actually read any more of the books. That was enough to send me off to get hold of the others and I binged on Wallander novels starting from the beginning to the end of the series. The TV series I'd watched it turns out diverged somewhat from the novels but they stayed true to the essence of the books. Mankell has made it clear in writing about the series that, apart from the crimes and their investigation, there's an underlying commentary on the changes in Swedish society in the latter part of the twentieth century particularly increasing violence, poverty, racism and the response to refugees both in the community and by government.

My only criticism of the novels is that, perhaps unfairly, I would have liked to have found out more about some of the other characters and how the differences they had with Wallander were or weren't resolved. Instead we move forward a few years into a new case with each book and some people have vanished - maybe moved on but we don't know why or how - and others with whom there was friction are still there and they're working together as if there had never been a problem.

I think the reason this bothers me is because Mankell does give us a brief explanation about others and where they fit into Wallander's life. He even brings in people from earlier novels to make a brief appearance when it's not necessary to the story. One example is when Wallander sees a young woman who smiles at him when he's at lunch and he remembers her part in solving a crime in an earlier novel. They don't speak and don't meet again. While I like this feeling of continuity in a small town where people are likely to meet up or be connected in some way I'd have liked a little more of an explanation however brief with regard to his work colleagues.

That whinge out of the way I have to say I really enjoyed my journey through the complex life of Kurt Wallander and the end of the series satisfied. I'm pleased to have now read all the novels and the novella An Event in Autumn - I've yet to read The Pyramid which is a collection of stories about Wallander as a young man which apparently fills out some of the backstory of how he ended up the man he is when the novels start. From various reviews I gather The Pyramid is not an essential read and for some even disappointing. For those reasons it's now in my To Be Read pile at some future date. That said, while bingeing isn't necessarily needed, I do recommend reading the novels in order to see how Kurt changes as he ages. 

I'm off now for a change of genre. I have a number of speculative fiction books ready to go and I might share something about them later.