Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
Reviewed by Mary Sue Daoud, 12/30/11
Corporate espionage, libel gone wrong,
sociopathic heroines with a penchant for hacking…and two villains so heinously
evil and insane that they take on the exaggerated feeling of caricatures—that is
the bulk of Stieg Larsson’s first book, The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Vintage Crime, 2008).
With
all the hype surrounding the series and the movies, I ordered the book from the
library and settled in. I had hoped it would be an intriguing read and a
pleasant way to while away an evening.
The
book opened intriguingly enough. Journalist and magazine publisher Mikael
Blomkvist was just sentenced for libel against bigtime financier Hans-Erik
Wennerstrom. Found guilty, he was given a whopping fine that cleared him out
and took with it quite a bit of the magazine. Burned out, he left on a leave of
absence in order to take a break, do his jail time, and write the family
history another bigtime CEO and patriarch, Henrik Vanger, hired him to do,
mainly as a cover for the main reason Vanger hired Blomkvist: to take one more
go at the mystery that had dominated Vanger’s life—the forty-year-old case of
Vanger’s missing niece. In exchange, Vanger would give him the information and
evidence Blomkvist would need to take Wennerstrom down.
Just
as in any big family, there are lots of interesting characters and subplots whose
stories thicken and enhance the plot as Blomkvist uncovers their stories and
motivations and dialogues with them. To help him along, Blomkvist hires Lisbeth
Salander, a troubled and abused punk with a gift for research in the way of
massive hacking. Together, they uncover the horrible skeletons in the Vanger family
closet—graphic, violent beyond description, involving rape, incest, kidnapping,
torture, murder (several actually), and a variety of other obscenities.
It’s
at the climax, when Blomkvist is in the heinous clutches of the villain, that
the reader realizes that the plot has suddenly taken an extremely ridiculous
twist. Such villains are far more suited to horror stories than this
pseudo-realistic mystery story. Never mind that Larsson felt driven to think
about and write up such dark characters—what possessed him to write a story
with such believable, complex characters like Blomkvist and Salander, then saddle
it with such grotesque villains? What could have been a fairly good story lost
its unity and turned into a lumpy, uneven, out of proportion story with all the
steam gone out of it.
Does
evil have to be so grotesque for us
to realize, Oh look, that is, without a
doubt, evil? What about the things the other characters do—things that are
morally questionable and, in some cases, remarkably stupid, like Blomkvist
having three affairs through the course of the book, one of which was a longstanding
one with a married woman (and the husband knows about it and is totally fine
with it.) Why is this book so popular?
The
book ends relatively happily, with the loose ends more or less tied up, and the
mysteries satisfactorily solved. It could have been a believable book, too, if
the antagonist’s story had matched in tone and in context. But with such
disproportionate evil, the story has the feeling of being written around the
antagonist, and the rest just window dressing to set him off. As he wrote two
other books based on Blomkvist and Salander, that was obviously not intended.
I
don’t think I’ll be spending more time with Larsson’s stories—where is my
Eliot?!