Review of A Treacherous Paradise, by Henning Mankell

A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



In the opening chapters of A Treacherous Paradise, by Henning Mankell, a young woman leaves a life of desperate poverty in rural Sweden in 1904 to seek her fortune aboard a sailing ship set for Australia. The beginning took me back to my own grandmother’s flight from Sweden a few years later, in 1908. After reading this book, I felt more strongly the hardships and dislocation she must have faced, sent out as a servant at the age of twelve and then boarding a ship for a strange land at the age of 18. While my grandmother ended up in America, Hanna, the heroine of this novel, embarks on a picaresque adventure that drops her serendipitously in a hot and segregated town on the coast of Portuguese East Africa, where she becomes the owner of a bordello. The story of Hanna’s time in East Africa reminded me of Gulliver’s Travels--and indeed Mankell refers to this work in the novel. His heroine sees many sights that amaze her, from a long tapeworm that inhabits a human body, to a magical potion that allows the owner to fly away unseen, to a chimpanzee that acts like a human. Mankell returns here to a favorite theme in his novels: the injustices of colonialism and the effects of racism on society. The author’s use of symbolism is at times heavy-handed: for example, the white dogs bred to attack black bodies. Hanna herself plays the role of an unwitting observer of the racism and injustice around her and seems as trapped by her circumstances as the African prostitutes in the bordello. The motives behind her decisions remain opaque, leading from one lucky or unlucky result to another and leaving the reader bemused. And Hanna, whose name changes several times in the course of the novel, like a butterfly in metamorphosis, seems equally bemused by the motives of those around her. In this hothouse of a colonial past, the behavior of Africans and of European colonists is itself the mystery, one that I suspect even Detective Wallander could not unravel.



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