Publishers Weekly
This bizarre and compelling tale from Swedish author Mankell, best known for his crime novels featuring detective Kurt Wallander (The Man Who Smiled, etc.), focuses on a tortured naval officer, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, who has the important duty of taking soundings for secret naval channels in the approach to Stockholm at the outbreak of WWI. Like a skilled stonemason, Mankell builds his portrait of Svartman with infinite patience, adding details and highlights layer by layer: Svartman as a naval officer attached to but not a part of a crew; Svartman as husband to a wife willingly left behind as he pursues his secret mission; and Svartman as the obsessed seeker of Sara, the lone inhabitant of Halsskär, a desolate and isolated island. Mankell fully sounds the depths of Svartman's obsessions in a way so artful as to appear artless, creating a masterful portrait not only of Svartman but of the women in his life. This is a memorable and shocking psychological study. (Apr.)
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Kirkus Reviews
About as profound as modern fiction gets, this depth-charge of a love story moves toward its tragic end with colossal certainty. In this soul-torn work, Mankell (The Man Who Smiled, 2006, etc.) has imagined a perfect existentialist hero-a man who does not know himself. Naval Commander and hydrographic survey engineer, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman is masterful at his work: conducting covert WWI operations to read depths around the Stockholm archipelago. At sea, he yearns for his distant wife, "the invisible lid he used to cover the abyss." For Lars is obscurely hurt, reeling in the shadow of a brutal father, and death-haunted aboard the ship. After the bosun mysteriously dies, a German sailor's corpse is hauled from the deep. Lieutenant Jakobsson keels over, too, and, discovering his colleague's diary, Lars is shaken to learn that the dead man had hated him, finding Lars "false" and a walking "illusion." Perhaps Jakobsson had suspected the secret: Lars's forays onto an island inhabited only by a ghostly siren, Sara the fisherwoman, whose husband had "died screaming, tangled up in a herring net." Lying to Sara that his own wife and daughter had fallen off a cliff, Lars desperately beds her. On leave, guilt-ridden, he then impregnates his wife, who'll bear him a daughter. And yet Sara will also become pregnant with his child. Before the two women confront him and his double-life has been ripped wide open, Lars will murder a stranger, attack Sara's father, be scandalously drummed out of the Navy and descend into a Dante-esque depth-the agony his wayward heart has caused the women who loved him. Simply extraordinary.
