The Rock Blaster

Afterword

It is 1972, and Henning Mankell learns that his novel Bergsprängaren has been accepted for publication. His first book. Writing about the international political situation at the time, he explains that “I remember what I was thinking. It was a time of great joy, of great energy. Everything was still possible. Nothing was either lost or settled. Except that the Vietnamese were certain to win. Imperialism was beginning to show signs of strain.”

The book is a modern “Everyman”, the story of an ordinary life filled with the usual triumphs and tragedies, great and small, set against the major Swedish and international political developments of the twentieth century. Oskar Johansson experiences some directly, others at a distance, but he does not believe that he has had anything to do with the changes that have taken place in Sweden during his lifetime. They have happened, and they have had an effect, but he feels he has played no role in their coming about.

In 1997, twenty-five years later, Bergsprängaren is republished, and Mankell adds a preface: “Certainly, much has happened in those twenty-five years. Some walls have come down, others have gone up. One empire has fallen, the other is being been weakened from within, new centres of power are taking shape. But the poor and exploited have become even poorer during these years. And Sweden has gone from making an honest attempt at building a decent society to social depredation. An ever-clearer division between those who are needed and those who are expendable. Today there are ghettos outside Swedish cities. Twenty-five years ago they did not exist.

“As I read through this book again after all these years, I realise that this quarter century has been but a short time in history. What I wrote here is still highly relevant.

“I have made a number of small changes to the wording for this edition. But the story is the same. I have not touched it. It was not necessary to do so.”

And now, in 2020, almost another “short time in history” after Mankell wrote his preface, Bergsprängaren is finally published in English as The Rock Blaster. What would Mankell say about it today?

Of course, the global political landscape has hardly improved. Migration, a significant issue ever since the end of the Second World War, has been brought into particular focus as immigration, and the Swedish ghettos of which he wrote in 1997 have seen frequent unrest. Populism, misinformation, and the weakening of liberal democratic values, which loom ever larger in our lives, would attract his strong criticism. His socialist heart would be no less saddened by the current state of social democracy in Sweden. What he wrote concerning the rise and fall of empires has been borne out, and the disparity between wealth and poverty has continued to grow, exacerbated by the dominance of corporate giants. And what would he make of climate change and the threat to our physical environment?

Oskar’s reality, according to Mankell, is a matter of the struggle between capitalism and socialism, between revolution and reformism. We know on whose side both he and Oskar stand in the first. But that battle is no longer the main one that divides our world - the primary focus now is not on left versus right, but on the growing authoritarianism in many societies; and nobody speaks of “imperialism”, in the sense that Mankell meant it, any more.

As for the second struggle, however intense both Oskar and Mankell’s longing for revolution - a longing fuelled by their disappointment in what Oskar calls social democracy’s “greatest outrage”, the fact that it “turned socialism into some sort of organisation for unnecessary civil servants to line their pockets at the expense of the workers” - in practice they are both reformers. Yes, Oskar is happy every time there is a revolution somewhere on the globe. And yes, he expects, and wants, “this whole society” to be blown apart (appropriately enough). But his contribution will merely be to “give them all my regards”. Confronted by Sergeant Lindholm at the Nazi rally in Humleg&rden, he does not take action, he can only “imagine himself charging in and jabbing his finger and thumb into the Sergeant’s face”.

Yet one hopes that Mankell would still consider what he wrote in The Rock Blaster “highly relevant”. Because Oskar is Everyman, whether he or the narrator (Is it Mankell? I think not) are right about whether he played a role in bringing about the social changes of the twentieth century. As most of us are. Ordinary people standing in the storm. And that is what makes The Rock Blaster such an engaging book, especially in a world as challenging and bewildering as ours today.

G.G., January 2020