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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Book review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

2:46 PM / Reviews / 1 Comment

Two things are clear about the final published instalment in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST. First: that while the first part, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, functioned adequately as a standalone novel, HORNETS' NEST and its predecessor, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, must be taken as an interwoven pair. Second: that, had he not died so prematurely, Larsson would undoubtedly have continued the series.

With Larsson deceased and the legal rights to the series (seemingly including a partial draft of the fourth novel, currently in the hands of his long-term partner, who was shut out of the publishing deal by Larsson's brother and father when they inherited his estate) a contentious mess, it seems pointless to speculate about there being any future instalments any time soon, meaning that a series that was never intended to be a trilogy must now be taken as such. This is a frustrating situation, because it means that a novel that in many ways feels like a mere stepping stone on a much larger journey now has to serve as the concluding instalment, which it admittedly does to some extent in terms of the Lisbeth Salander storyline. At the same time, though, a number of loose ends remain, perhaps most notably a lengthy subplot involving Blomkvist's colleague and on-off lover Erika Berger taking a job with a rival publication and being subjected to a campaign of terror perpetrated by a sadistic stalker. This storyline, which runs for a good two-thirds of the book before being resolved, has no real bearing on the main thread (the Salander/Zalachenko business) and I wouldn't be surprised if the makers of the film adaptation excised it completely (I haven't seen the film yet, so I'm only guessing). In the context of a much longer series of books, however, I'm sure it was intended to serve as the setup for some broader arc that will now never be revealed.

The plot picks up from where THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE ended, so if you don't want to know how that book turned out, stop reading NOW.

* SPOILERS FOR THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE *

Lisbeth Salander and her estranged father, Soviet defector Alexander Zalachenko, are rushed to hospital in the aftermath of the carnage that ensued at Gosseberga, Zalachenko grievously wounded by Salander and Salander with a bullet fired by Zalachenko embedded in her skull. The charges against Salander are numerous and, assuming she survives the injury that by rights should have killed her immediately, she is at the very least looking at a lengthy stretch behind bars for attempted murder. That Salander went to Gosseberga to kill her father is in little doubt as far as the reader is concerned. However, the events of the previous two novels have repeatedly demonstrated that Salander, from a very young age, has been a victim of judicial injustice, part of a concerted cover-up by a rogue off-shoot of the security service who deemed protecting their asset, Zalachenko, more important than Salander's well-being (it's a long story). The dice are loaded, and they don't favour Salander. If she's to get out of this, she and her ragtag allies are going to have to be every bit as unscrupulous as the men who want to lock her away for good.

This is the perfect setup for a tense and gripping story. Unfortunately, Larsson makes the same mistake he made in THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, which is that he never gives us any real reason to fear for Salander. In the previous novel, her seemingly superhuman ability to avoid detection ensured that we never really believed the police would catch her. Here, Salander is so calm and collected and has so many aces up her sleeve that the same applies. The "one woman against the state" theme is also undercut by the sheer number of people she has fighting her corner. For someone who has repeatedly been set up as an outsider who has been betrayed at every turn, it's rather amazing how many people will risk their careers, reputations and in some cases lives for her. Once this becomes clear, we essentially spend 500-odd pages waiting for the inevitable to happen, with Larsson nailing his political colours to the mast and leaving the reader in no doubt as to the point he is trying to make:

"...When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it's about violence against women, and the men who enable it."

That's not a quotation from an introduction or review of the book, by the way. It's an actually line of dialogue spoken by one character to another. Subtlety is to Larsson what fairness and balance are to Fox News. And yet...

...and yet I couldn't put the book down. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST is a frustrating read, more satisfying for its individual components than when taken as a whole. As with the previous novels, it's easy to pick holes in the storytelling, to make fun of the wooden dialogue and soapbox-style posturing, to point to all the sections that could have been deleted without anyone missing them in order to get the thing down to a more manageable length. But when you're staying up till four in the morning, turning each page with unabashed impatience and salivating for the next plot turn (even though you can guess well in advance what it will be), who the hell cares? The Millennium trilogy is quite rightly described as a literary phenomenon, and there can be nothing more phenomenal about it than the fact that so many millions of people around the world have embraced these three rambling, quirky and at times downright clumsy Swedish doorstops.

And yes, I was ultimately satisfied. The Salander storyline reaches its conclusion and a line can finally be drawn under nearly three decades of uncertainty and injustice. Ancillary though it is, the Berger subplot is also interesting in its own right and feels as if it came from a very real place (because of Larsson's tireless investigation of extreme right-wing groups, he himself had good reason to fear for his life, and it's not hard to see parallels between Berger's situation and his own). There's a certain dissonance to the novel as a whole, and if you go into it expecting it to neatly wrap up every thread introduced in the two previous novels, you are likely to be sorely disappointed. However, if you approach it with an awareness of its faults and an appreciation for what Larsson was trying to do, however clumsily, I suspect that, like me, you'll be deeply sorry to bid farewell to Lisbeth Salander, the world's first Asperger-suffering, photographic memory-imbued, bisexual goth computer hacker and crusader for justice.

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