Daniel Book

There are parallels in Henning Mankell's 'Daniel' to Emma Donoghue's 'Room,' another unsettling novel centered on abuse and captivity'a child seen from his own point of view (albeit not exclusively, as is the case with 'Room'), a queasy undercurrent of voyeurism infecting the moral outrage felt in reading exposé. It's a daring breakaway from the format for which Mannkell is known.

Daring, but not altogether surprising for Mankell, who has made categorizing the dark, introspective, and insightful Kurt Wallander series as mere police procedurals seem all too narrow.

'Daniel' is very, very dark. A young man in a drab little Swedish town in the latter half of the nineteenth century leaves his demented, syphilitic, dying father, and his barren home, to pursue a medical career. He faints during his first autopsy. He discovers he has no purpose in life, other than regular, businesslike onanism and regular, perfunctory concubinary trysts. No self-reflection follows. He stumbles through the swales of academia and in the most random of ways decides he will become famous by discovering an unknown insect. In the Kalihari Desert.

It's there that Hans Bengler finds his purpose. He will be "father" to a child orphaned in the imperial battles Europeans are fighting to see who gets South Africa. Daniel is Bengler's name for the boy who continues to think of himself as Molo, even after learning Swedish and seeing snow.

Bengler quite literally leashes Molo and trains him like a dog as well. "My name is Daniel. I believe in God," the waif dutifully recites as Bengler displays his curiosity to pallid countrymen for whom an African is no less strange than an alien or monster or freak.

Pretty bleak stuff. The relief Mankell offers is his craft'meticulously assembled observation and narrative that never calls attention to itself yet transcends its ordinariness, its plainness, to shine light on the human condition in all its ugliness and beauty. The voice of the child is particularly striking, and touching, and, in an odd way, hopeful. We may rip apart children's lives but we cannot steal the pure truth of their perception, untainted by tawdry experience.

How is it that we can be so beguiled by the sordid that we ignore, or worse, accept the squandering of our most precious treasure? How can we allow child abuse? There's the hope'that we can recognize how valuable our children are, and do something about it.

Highly recommended.