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Sunday, February 14, 2010

Book review: The Girl Who Played with Fire

11:54 AM / Reviews / 1 Comment

Yes, it's better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. How much better you find it to be will depend on your ability to once again slog through a considerable quantity of Stieg Larsson's observations about trivia that have nothing to do with the plot, such as (anti-)heroine Lisbeth Salander's newfound fascination with mathematics, in particular trying to figure out Fermat's Last Theorem.

Some things never change.

The novel, the second instalment in Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy, opens with Salander holidaying in the Caribbean, where she becomes caught up in the destruction caused by Hurricane Matilda and simultaneously manages to prevent an absurdly convoluted murder attempt. It's all quite thrilling, but this 60-page episode has no bearing on the actual narrative of the book. None whatsoever. You could literally (as the makers of the 2009 film version did) cut it out entirely and no-one would be any the wiser.

When it finally gets going, though, The Girl Who Played with Fire turns out to be considerably more engaging than its predecessor. There are two reasons for this: the timeline and the subject matter. Whereas Salander and her unlikely accomplice, Mikael Blomkvist, spent the bulk of the first novel investigating a 40-year-old crime that may or may not have actually occurred, The Girl Who Played with Fire, while still drawing on the past, unravels primarily in the present, with Salander framed (or was she?) for a triple murder and on the run from both the authorities, convinced they are looking for a deranged psychopath, and a shadowy group of sinister individuals who have reasons of their own for wanting her to disappear off the face of the earth.

Larsson uses this tale to once again lay into the pillars of society, this time indicting not only investigative journalism but also the police, the sex trade and the health care service, with particular attention paid to the treatment of those deemed mentally ill. We see how Salander's murky past comes back to haunt her as every scrap of information about her his dug up and used to justify the vilification of her as the most depraved maniac Sweden has ever seen.

The frenzy only intensifies when Salander's on-off girlfriend, Miriam Wu, enters the picture, as Larsson really turns up the heat and lays into his targets with abandon: now Salander is painted by the press as the stereotypical mad lesbian killer. She's not merely crazy and violent, damn it: she has sex with women! She's a threat to the very moral foundation of society! A theme running throughout the novel is the notion that even a society as supposedly liberal and open-minded as Sweden will invariably fall back on old prejudices when the status quo is threatened.

What's particularly interesting about all of this is Salander's reaction. She isn't remotely surprised; she barely even gets angry, except when Miriam is harassed by the paparazzi. It's as if she's so used to society ill-treating her that she simply accepts being framed for a triple murder as something that was bound to happen sooner or later.

Unfortunately, we never really fear for her. The problem is that Larsson sets her up as an almost superhuman entity. He presents her as a master of disguise, capable of going undetected despite there being a nationwide manhunt for her and able to hack into any computer system. He also, in the 200 or so pages before the story proper gets going, sets up a situation in which she is allowed to live very comfortably and in perfect anonymity, almost as if she was planning for the whole thing. On some level, I suspect he did this to plant a seed of doubt in the reader's mind, suggesting that Salander could just possibly have carried out the murders and set the whole thing up months in advance, but it never really convinces. It removes a lot of the tension, turning the hunt for her into little more than an inconvenience. It's telling that one of the few genuinely tense moments in the book (and it is truly tense) is when Miriam is kidnapped. Unlike Salander, Miriam is not superhuman and we do genuinely fear for her safety.

Salander also disappears from the narrative for the majority of the second act, which presents problems of its own. While I'm increasingly coming to agree with Joan Smith's assertion that Salander is "not so much a character as a revenge fantasy come to life", she is by a considerable margin the most interesting figure in the trilogy, and the narrative drive suffers when she isn't there. We never really doubt her innocence (well, as innocent as Salander can be - it is made clear on numerous occasions that she would kill if she felt she had good reason to do so), but the characters who end up carrying the can throughout the novel's middle stretch are a rather uninteresting lot. The man leading the hunt for Salander, Inspector Bublanski, is a bland but ultimately well-meaning plod, while his underlings run the gamut from capable career woman (aren't they all, in Larsson's writing?) Modig to one-dimensional homophobe Faste. And of course Blomkvist is Blomkvist. He's still shagging his way through the entire female population of Sweden (this time he adds Harriet Vanger to his impressive roster) and he still seems to serve as a sort of wish fulfilment fantasy for Larsson. Most damagingly, Blomkvist and Salander never actually appear "on screen" together until the very end, robbing us of the unique partnership that was Dragon Tattoo's most interesting aspect.

And yet it's still a great read. For all its strodgy prose and the nagging sensation that what you're is reading is a first draft in desperate need of trimming, it is - like its predecessor - a brilliant page-turner. It's impossible not to barrel through it, eagerly anticipating what will happen next, and the final page concludes on such an open-ended note that the natural course of action will be to plunge straight into the third and final part of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

PS. Towards the end of the novel, there is a scene in which Blomkvist breaks into Salander's apartment and successfully guesses her security code: "WASP". Those who read the first book will understand the significance of this word. The notion that someone so security-conscious would go with such an obvious password and then be surprised when someone who knows her well guesses it is a little too much to swallow. In the real world, the only people who use "meaningful" passwords are the complete amateurs who think they're being really clever by choosing the name of their dog or favourite sports team. I mention this because, in a novel which includes both a man who conspires to kill his wife and collect the insurance by engineering that she be swept away by a hurricane, and a giant who is impervious to pain, it was for me the single least plausible moment.

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