The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson is the sequel to Larsson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which I read earlier this year. The series, which is dubbed “The Millennium Trilogy” and includes the just released The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, is trumpeted in press releases as a publishing phenomenon selling a bazillion copies on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring hardcore fans to import copies because they couldn’t wait for the American release dates, prompting two different film franchises, one in it’s native Sweden and a soon to be produced American version, and making “Swedish mysteries” a suddenly popular literary sub-genre.
All of this hubbub has got to mean something, right? Well, don’t drink the Kool-aid just yet. I was initially drawn to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo based on a glowing New York Times review, which dubbed it exceptionally smart and literary for a mystery/thriller. The Times Book Review also put it in their top ten books of the year the year it was released. I don’t know what they were smoking, but there is nothing in this series to raise it above your standard beach read.
I’m going to talk about both The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire together because “Fire” is in essence the middle chapter of the Trilogy and really doesn’t stand on it’s own. Although it makes half-hearted attempts to bring new readers up to speed, it presupposes knowledge of the first book. In “Dragon Tattoo” we are introduced to Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist is a recently disgraced investigative reporter who is hired by an eccentric industrialist to solve the mystery of his niece who disappeared 30 years earlier. Salander is a computer hacker who becomes his research assistant. She is “The Girl…” in all of the titles and this is basically her story despite how the first book starts off the overall story arc.
In “Fire” Salander is accused of murdering three people and in the ensuing investigation her mysterious past is brought to light. Salander is an extremely interesting and compelling character. She is the reason I kept chugging along through this often messy and convoluted story. Larsson wisely makes Salander the central character after the first book, even though her portrayal becomes unbelievably cartoonish as the series progresses. While she at first seems intriguingly conflicted and contradictory, as the layers are pulled back she is made to be a veritable super-hero to the detriment of any expectations of realism. We find out she is a savant with a photographic memory who can hack into any computer and memorize and learn “anything” by reading it once. There is a forced tangent shoehorned into “Fire” about how she reads theoretical mathematics textbooks just for fun and solves Fermat’s Theorem, which has perplexed mathematicians for hundreds of years, in a matter of weeks.
Salander’s characterization is not the only time Larsson falls into fan-fiction wish fulfillment in his writing. Blomkvist (a character clearly modeled on himself, they both share the same background) sleeps with every eligible female character in both books, just because he can under Larsson’s pen, whether it makes sense plot-wise or not.
Larsson takes many liberties story-wise. His plots are sloppy and meandering, he goes off on tangents that have nothing to do with the overall story, and he has a frequent tendency to bend plot logic to suit his needs. He tries to set up an underlying theme of Sweden’s backward attitude of violence toward women but revels in his salaciously detailed depictions of rape and torture throughout the two books.
These books are entertaining enough if you totally shut off your brain, Salander is an extremely readable character, and the momentum and cliffhangers are enough to propel you along. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why Larsson is so highly regarded, when in my estimation he’s no different than a populist page turner like James Patterson.
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