[Book Review] The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by phill
Unlike the literate hypocrite over there, I haven’t got a cult classic to review today, but rather a modern-day, multi-million-copy selling, award-winning blockbusting bestseller by Stieg Larsson entitled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It was originally written in Swedish and then translated into English following its success in Europe. It is the first of a trilogy of books that Stieg Larsson left unpublished after his death in 2004. The English translation of the second book is due out next year and is entitled The Girl Who Played with Fire. So far the trilogy has sold over 2.1 million copies in Sweden alone. And to be honest, I’d have thought that 2.1 million Swedes would have better taste.
The protagonist of the story is one Michael Blomkvist; a famed financial journalist whose focus is on writing articles that hold large corporations ethically responsible for their actions. The story centres on the mystery surrounding a wealthy business magnate’s (Henrik Vanger) niece (Harriet Vanger) going missing forty years earlier. Following a public disgracing at the hands of another large business magnate (Hans-Erik Wennerström), is employed by Henrik to try his hand at solving the mystery in exchange for a stupidly large amount of money and another shot at destroying the corrupt Wennerström.
Michael Blomkvist as a character is morally upright, never judges people, gets on well with everyone, is handsome, and nails every single female character that walks into the path of his unflappable demeanor. Sounds like a pretty cool guy to be along for the ride with, and it was, until I stumbled a bit on the third of said nailings and realised something: it is pretty bloody obvious that Stieg Larsson fancied himself as the main character. Once you’ve realised this, it is really hard to look at anything the ever-perfect Blomkvist does without doing so through an narcissistic-author-shaped filter. He literally does not set a foot wrong the entire book (bar one memorable scene where I hoped to heck Stieg would grow some balls and kill him, but alas no), and anything he does bugger up is ratified by all the other characters as having been the right thing to do given his position. In short, he’s about as three-dimensional as the fridge that was in The Da Vinci Code; there to progress the story, but not possessing any memorable qualities bar his ability to remain cool in most any situation.
Enter the title character–some would say the real main character–Lisbeth Salander. She has been subjected to all of societies terrible facets: child abuse, sexual abuse, rape, prejudice against socially unskilled people (she suffers from what I assume is Asperger’s Syndrome), abuse of the legal system, etc. Thankfully she’s landed on her feet and developed an ability to hack into any system and exhibits quite profound social engineering skills. She uses these skills to her advantage as an investigator who performs private background checks for other people. The legality of this and its moral implications is one of the themes explored when Salander and Blomkvist are thrown together as a team to solve the murder mystery (she performs a background check on Blomkvist for Henrik and ends up taking a personal interest in the case). The other two are accountability of psychos/nature of evil (i.e. whether they can blame it on their upbringing or if it’s inherent from the start) and the prominence of violence against women in today’s society.
What follows is a convoluted and ultimately deus ex machina-ey exploration of the history of the Vanger family which leads to the eventual solving of the case. Along the way we are treated to (in my opinion) an unnecessary rape scene, a series of lucky breaks, and admittedly some nice detective work, but nothing that wouldn’t be right at home in a Nancy Drew novel. In retrospect, it does read relatively quickly and easily, and Larsson is proficient enough with the chapter cliffhanger that you’ll often want to keep reading when you should really stop and turn out the light for the night. But that brings me to the style that the book is written in. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the translation, or because Larsson was actually a journalist, but it reads like a report. It’s especially evident near the start of the book, when you’re not used to it yet, in that it seems like every new paragraph is for doing one thing and one thing only. This paragraph is to describe all the physical features of Lisbeth. This paragraph is to make sure you’re fully aware of the moral values of Blomkvist. This paragraph is to explain the decade-long fuck buddy relationship of Blomkvist with his publisher (who says you can’t mix business and pleasure?). There’s no overlapping shades of meaning or intent between paragraphs, just big bold block colours that are really easy to pick out and follow, but hardly contain subtlety. Thankfully this style redeems itself later in the story when you do need big basic blocks to keep track of all the myriad of family members, relationships, and historic locations, but it would be nice for Larsson to have changed it up every now and again in order to give some texture.
There’s not a lot more I can say about the plot without ruining anything, but it does move at a good pace, and there’s enough in the revelation of the mystery to encourage you to finish it. The ending I found slightly disappointing, but it’s obvious that it was written with a sequel in mind, so I can’t really judge it as a result. Essentially I’d place this book in the same sort of area as The Da Vinci Code; good for a quick, easy read, but don’t expect anything revolutionary in a literary sense.
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