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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Book review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2:59 PM / Reviews / 1 Comment

In its original Swedish, the title of the first part of Stieg Larsson's posthumously-published Millennium trilogy is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, a literal translation of which is "Men Who Hate Women". It's unclear precisely why the English translation was titled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, although perhaps the publishers believed the original title to be too off-putting in its pointed aggressiveness.

In any event, misogyny is a theme that weaves its way throughout this lengthy but densely plotted crime thriller, along with broader motifs of corruption and the abuse of power. This first instalment introduces us to Mikael Blomkvist, journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium and an outspoken critic of mainstream investigative journalism. As the story begins, he has just been convicted of libel, making accusations about a rival publisher but being unable to back them up. With his reputation in tatters, Blomkvist is contacted by Henrik Vanger, head of the Vanger Corporation, with an employment offer for what initially appears to be a futile endeavour: to dig into the dynasty's mysterious past and uncover the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Vanger's granddaughter Harriet forty years ago.

So far, so Agatha Christie. It's the conventional "locked room" scenario, with the suspects - all members of the Vanger family - marooned on an island at the time of Harriet's disappearance. Larsson is (was) clearly a fan of the novels of Christie, Conan Doyle et al, and these, in addition to the works of everyone from Astrid Lindgren to Val McDermid to Enid Blyton, are referenced copiously throughout the novel. At times it gets a little too arch: Blomkvist is so acutely aware that his situation parallels that of many a crime thriller that Larsson comes dangerously close to breaking the fourth wall (shades of Scream and "It's as if we're in a horror movie"). Still, it's an intricately constructed mystery and one that does reach a genuinely satisfying and (to me at least) unexpected conclusion...

...except that putting a lid on the Harriet Vanger mystery is not the end of the novel. On the contrary, Larsson is more interested in the feud between the disgraced Blomkvist and his arch-rival, Hans-Erik Wennerström, the man who sued him for libel. Wennerström is a rather nasty piece of work, and just how nasty he is becomes clear in the final few chapters, but this and the Harriet Vanger case are never brought together in anything approaching a satisfying way. (Henrik Vanger does initially bribe Blomkvist into investigating Harriet's disappearance with the claim that he possesses sufficient evidence to sink Wennerström, but this turns out to be a bit of a red herring.) The only real common ground between them is Blomkvist, and he's far from the world's most engaging protagonist. Aloof and rather snobbish, it's difficult to ever feel any connection to him, and at no point did I ever find myself empathising with him or fearing for his safety, even when his life was endangered. The parallels between Blomkvist and Larsson make it hard not to see him as a Mary Sue of sorts, while this middle-aged and decidedly uncharismatic journalist's apparent irresistibility to the opposite sex reeks strongly of wish fulfilment and gives James Bond a run for his money in terms of the sheer number of women he beds in the course of 500+ pages.

Enter Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed girl of the book's title and, I'm led to believe, the true protagonist of the trilogy. While Blomkvist is a bland and not very engaging hero, Salander is quite the opposite: a fiercely antagonistic social outcast and wild child quite possibly suffering from Asperger syndrome, she has spent most of her life rebelling against the various institutions into whose care she has been placed. We meet her as her newly appointed legal guardian takes control of her finances and then brutally rapes her. Salander's revenge... well, I'd rather not give away the specifics, but suffice it to say that she leaves him in no doubt as to which of them is the boss and, in a very short space of time, has him wrapped around her little finger. Although described as a delinquent and having never completed school, Salander is ferociously intelligent, equipped with a photographic memory and an uncanny shrewdness. She's also extremely opinionated and doesn't care whose nose she puts out of joint. For instance, a key aspect of her personality is that she has taken responsibility for her own life and believes that anyone who hasn't done the same is a waste of space. As a result, she has little time for Blomkvist's conviction that those who were abused early in life and go on to become abusers themselves can't be considered wholly responsible for their actions. She's an infinitely more interesting character than Blomkvist, not necessarily because she's more likeable - on the contrary, she's the sort of woman most sane people would cross the street to avoid - but because she's so much more colourful. When, a little over half way through the book, she and Blomkvist finally meet and she becomes involved both with him and the Harriet Vanger mystery, the narrative acquires a much-needed sense of purpose and urgency that it previously lacked.

Not speaking a word of Swedish myself, I read the English translation by Reg Keeland (who has also translated the works of Henning Mankell and Karin Alvtegen). The English text is very polished and I was rarely aware that what I was reading was not the material's original language. Any problems I had with the style were, I suspect, down to Larsson's own shortcomings as a novelist. The scenic descriptions are perfectly fluid, but the dialogue often feels flavourless, with everyone generally talking in the exact same way, from the octogenarian Henrik Vanger to Blomkvist's sixteen-year-old daughter. Larsson also has a tendency to overload on the details, anally obsessing over such mundanities as what Blomkvist had on his toast and what he was wearing when he ate it. (And don't get me started on the absurdly obvious product placement for Apple computers, which includes a section detailing the specifications of Salander's new laptop, down to what type of video card it has and how it is secretly the envy of every Windows PC user.) As a result of his inability to cut to the chase, the pacing feels a little off at times, and on at least one occasion I was told that Blomkvist had experienced a breakthrough in his investigation, only to have to plough through several pages of seemingly pointless asides in order to find out what it was. I'll be very interested to see how the writers of the 2009 movie adaptation have succeeded in boiling this often tortuous narrative down to a mere two and a half hours' running time.

I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the small hours of the morning and, despite my reservations about elements of Larsson's style and the blandness of the Blomkvist character, I had to fight off the urge to immediately get stuck into the second instalment, The Girl Who Played with Fire. It's far from a perfect novel, and I can't help thinking that many of those who are praising it for its supposedly high brow nature in comparison to the bulk of the genre's output (the front cover is adorned with a quote from Philip Pullman, describing it as "[s]everal cuts above most thrillers") have simply been seduced by its page count and the fact that it can get a bit heavy-going at times. (When it comes to crime novels, I'm inclined to agree with Denise Mina, who feels that they should be gripping and pacey rather than self-consciously worthy intellectual exercises.) However, ignore all the posturing about its much-vaunted intellectual merits and you still have a complex and involving mystery and an extremely compelling character in the form of Lisbeth Salander. I can't wait to find out what the sullen little goth gets up to next.

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