The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: a book review

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Knopf    September 2008   ISBN 0307269752 480 pages

You may recall that this book was one of the hot items in the fall publishing season last year. It was a sensation in Europe, and the claim was made that it would be an equally compelling read for Americans. For the most part, I agree that this novel is successful at crossing the Atlantic Ocean without losing interest for readers. Despite being set in Sweden, and being somewhat lengthy, it is engineered in such a way that it is addictively readable.

In its heart of hearts, this novel is a crime story that envisions human existence as a sophisticated battle between good and evil. To a certain extent, author Stieg Larsson is unafraid to cross boundaries in his writing. Is it a romance? Is it a serial killer drama? Is it an analysis of human nature? Is it an exploration of modern western culture, and the ways in which the complexities of our lives give evil so many places to hide? It is all of those things. There are a few things in this story that on close examination may not quite be believable. But for the most part, Larsson's risks pay off.

On a basic plot level, it's about Mikael Blomqvist (yes, I warned you about the Sweden thing) who is a well known Swedish muckraking journalist who specializes in exposing coroporate wrongdoing, and rails at the willingness of his fellow journalists to ride around in the back pocket of financial hucksters and lying CEOs. (Jim Cramer comes to mind). Blomqvist starts out the book getting set up by one of his targets and taking a fall, with jail time, in a libel case. Through the course of the story, he tries to redeem himself by finding and executing the Big Story, the one that has always eluded him. The Story ends up being even bigger than he suspects, and he finds it essential to team up with Lisbeth Sallander, a tattoed and pierced street girl and computer geek, a sort of hippie hacker. Her abilities to find the truth complement his own perfectly, and they get more than they bargained for, in a story that becomes increasingly suspenseful, and ends up involving an amount of physical violence that seems more typical of an American crime novel than a European one. The plot involves the effort of a Swedish industrial magnate to find the person responsible in the disappearance of his niece many years ago, and grows into a hunt for a killer and an effort to save one financial empire and to destroy another.

One of the intriguing things about this book is that is has a sensibility about sex that is Scandinavian. When characters in the story like each other, are of the opposite genders, and feel a physical attraction, they usually act on it. In the USA, we tend to think that monogamy is the human norm, but that value is not present here. You have a feeling that sexuality lacks the taboo of monogamy for them, and that even public figures found to be carrying on affairs outside of marriage would simply say, so what? Where sexuality and evil meet in the story is terms of the desire to dominate and exploit- in a couple of places, controlling male characters combine their sex drives with sadism, with horrific results. This is the crime that seems to most outrage Sallander- and she is quite willing to get even with such perps by any means necessary. So you are taken into the moral issue- when do the defenders of good become evil themselves? It's a question ripped from the headlines in a way. I can visualize Sallander hacking her way into Bernie Madoff's Ponzi empire and bringing it down with a single dirty trick- before the investors lost all their money, and I think, would that have been a bad thing even if hacking is illegal? In regarding that slippery moral slope, it is worth noting that in some ways this book has a very liberal political sensibility. For one thing, Larsson is very clear on the point that large corporate financial empires should not be allowed to police themselves.

Stieg Larsson is a born storyteller, as I say. The plot and the characters are woven together pretty seamlessly. It is a shame that Larsson has died at a relatively young age. Before he passed on, he completed book two of the Blomqvist/Sallander series, and apparently had book three near completion. I will be reading those as well. Book two is entitled The Girl Who Played With Fire, and will be published July 28, 2009. I expect to find out the mysteries of Sallander's past, and I can't wait. One question, though: how much is a Kronor in American money?