The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo | Stieg Larsson

Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the water, that the superlatives and invectives have all been hurled and I could actually sit down and see what all the fuss was about, the ghost of Stieg Larsson and his Millenium Trilogy have bounced back in the American spotlight, due to the seemingly simultaneous release of the third and final book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the US DVD release of the Swedish adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the news of the American remake being helmed by David Fincher, and the international release of the film based on the second novel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. The championing and decrying of the series have taken on Twilight proportions, each side becoming descending into the type of arguing you see in a children’s schoolyard or, more appropriately, a post about Twilight:

Person 1: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the best mystery of all time! You suck!
Person 2: It’s a piece of $#@!, and YOU suck!

God Bless the Internet.

My natural response to rabid fandom and it’s polar opposite (rabid un-fandom?) is to cry “fie” on both parties and leave the scene of the crime. But since I already had a copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I was curious – an American phenomenon I can ignore (we are, after all, heathens), but an honest to goodness International phenomenon? I had to decide for myself. 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo turns not to not be nearly as bad as the haters would leave you to believe. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as good as the lovers would have you believe, either. It’s a serviceable mass-market thriller that despite its length (640 pages) reads very quickly, features an interesting character dynamic between its two leads, plenty of lurid sex and violence and some interesting set pieces around its central mystery.

It’s also easily 100 pages too long, bereft of any real emotional involvement, clunky in its dialogue, ambiguous at best and ambivalent at worst as to the nature and motivations of its main protagonist, and fumbles a major subplot, ignoring it for almost the entire novel, then returning to it for the lat 70 pages after the reader has already received their satisfaction at the conclusion of the main mystery.

Before continuing, a brief summary of the story for those who haven’t been inundated by the latest media blitz: Mikeal Blomkvist is a tired, weathered journalist and editor of the Millennium news magazine who, at the novel’s opening, is found guilty in a libel case against a Swedish industrialist. Faced with an impending 90-day prison sentence, he takes a leave of absence from the magazine when he’s approached by Henrik Vanger, CEO of the Vanger Corporation with an offer Blomkvist can’t refuse: under the cover of writing Vanger’s biography he’s charged with solving a mystery – the disappearance and possible murder 40 years previously of Henriks’s beloved niece Harriet. Joining in the investigation is Lisabeth Salender (the titular “Girl”), a brilliant researcher and computer hacker who is drawn into Blomkvist’s world when she is hired to do a background check on him. Blomkvist and Salander uncover much more than any of the surviving members of the Vanger family would like, and pretty soon the pair are up to their necks in sadistic trouble.

The original title of the novel translates to “Men Who Hate Women”, and it’s a fitting theme to the story. There are numerous instances of brutal violence, some of which are implied or reported on after the fact, but some of which happen during the course of the novel. Larsson was supposedly addressing a major concern in the current Swedish culture, but the way he paints the action and his response to it, in the form of Lisabeth’s own revenge, strikes me as more than a bit odd. Her carefully calculated and no less violent form of revenge on her adversaries does little to recommend her in my mind as a strongly written female rather than just make her a cardboard cutout like everyone else in the book. Even the question as to her own mental health – for all the talk of her having Asperger’s there's only one mention of it in the first novel, and it’s a guess by a reporter who doesn’t seem to have any background in medicine – feels like something tacked on instead of being a integral piece of her character.

Despite this, she’s still the best thing in the novel (and the film for that matter, but that’s another discussion). Mikael, the ostensible protagonist, is paper-thin in terms of actual character, a grizzled, brilliant journalist whose integrity is beyond reproach even as he sleeps with three different women (two of who – of course – fall for him) in the course of the novel. The supporting characters don’t fare much better, and anyone who’s read more than half a dozen mysteries will probably figure out who the villain is as soon as they’re introduced.

And yet (there’s always a “yet”), there was enough potential in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo that I can’t dismiss it entirely out of hand. It’s your standard potboiler, no more, no less, satisfying all the needs for a simple beach read. The central mystery was engaging despite the wooden writing, and Larsson’s knowledge of the newspaper world and some of the background the novel covers shows through in the writing. I enjoyed discovering the clues that led to the answer surrounding Harriet Vanger’s disappearance, and I was intrigued enough by Lisabeth Salander that I’ll be reading The Girl Who Played With Fire next week while I’m on vacation.

On a beach, appropriately enough.