Book Reviews: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006)

Since the glory days of Harry Potter, no book series has exploded onto the culture like Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy. The backstory to the books is fascinating. Larsson was a left-wing investigative journalist in Sweden who spent most of his career writing about various extremist groups in his home country. But in his free time, he wrote a series of crime stories about the seamier side of Swedish life. According to some reports, he planned to write ten of these stories, and by 2004 he had completed three, which were accepted for publication in Sweden. Soon thereafter, in November 2004, Larsson died of a heart attack. He was only 50 years old. The first book in the series was published the next year in Sweden, and was an enormous success. Soon the books had become a global phenomenon. By May 2010, 27 million copies had been sold worldwide. All three books have been made into movies in Sweden, and an English-language movie based on the first book is scheduled for release in December.

As a big fan of crime fiction, and a sentimentalist moved by an author's dying just as he was about to become world famous, I was interested in these books. So far I have read two of them. Being a sentimentalist, I wish I could report that they were really good. But as a big fan of crime fiction, I must admit that they are actually quite dreadful.

To be fair, the first book (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) starts promisingly. Back in the mid-1960's, a teenage girl who belonged to one of the richest and most powerful families in Sweden disappeared from the family's estate during a family gathering. She's been gone for almost 40 years. But every year since her disappearance, the uncle who loved her receives a pressed flower similar to the ones she gave him as a child. The uncle asks Mikael Blomkvist (a crusading left-wing journalist in trouble for committing libel) to find out what happened to his niece. Meanwhlie, Blomkvist's actions are being followed by Lisbeth Salandar, a 20-something genius hacker with a photographic memory, very poor social skills, and a big tattoo of a dragon on her back. Will Mikael meet Lisbeth? Will they find out what happened to the missing niece? All in all, not a bad framework for a thriller.

The problem is that Larsson's skills as a fiction writer are extremely limited. Neither Blomkvist nor Salandar seem like real people. Blomkvist, the crusading lefty journalist who sleeps with almost every woman he meets -- yet retains his dogged moral certitude -- seems very much like the idealized version of himself one would expect someone with Larsson's background to make up. Salandar, who combines the personality and computer skills of Mark Zuckerberg with gothic looks and a remarkably eager sexual appetite (particularly when it comes to middle-aged crusading lefty journalists), is more like a nerd fantasy than an actual human being.

Of course, no one expects fully-developed characters in a thriller, but Larsson spends enormous amounts of time on aspects of Blomkvist's and Salandar's personal lives that bear absolutely no relation to our plot. In particular, he spends a lot of time on their sex lives, even though he writes just about the dreariest and most tiresome sex scenes I have ever read.

Despite these holdups, the plot creaks along, with Blomkvist and Salandar making discoveries every 50 pages or so. But as the plot develops, it becomes increasingly obvious that Larsson has dragged his political prejudices into his fiction as well. Any left-wing character is good. Businessmen, mainstream government officials, and people with traditional views on almost anything are bad. (If you read the Bible, you're really bad.) The Swedish title of the book is Man som hatar kvinnor -- Men Who Hate Women -- which gives you a sense of Larsson's black-and-white view of the world. This stereotyping is not only tiresome in and of itself -- it undermines the whole point of a thriller, which is to surprise the reader. Polemics are not surprising, and I can't imagine that any reader was particularly surprised by the identity of the villains in this story.

Despite my problems with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I subsequently tried the second book in the series, because some commentators indicated that it was better than the first. Those commentators were wrong.

The second book is called The Girl Who Played with Fire, and this title is a direct translation of the Swedish title, Flickan som lekte med elden. The Girl Who Played with Fire is significantly worse than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Instead of a cool set-up involving a missing rich girl, we are given an episodic series of adventures relating to various issues with little obvious connection to each other, such as the sex trade in Sweden, the future of Blomkvist's magazine, Salandar's romantic life, and whether or not Salandar murdered three people in Sweden. No suspense results from any of these adventures, because Larsson's propagandizing again signals the identity of our heroes and villains, and because Salandar's expertise in computers and research has now been combined with mastery of weapons, money, and whatever other powers she may need to overcome her enemies. Also, Larsson apparently could not develop complicated plots that would work naturally, because time and again he has to bail out his characters with ludicrous coincidences. (Blomkvist just happens to be walking near Salandar's apartment at 3 AM when she is attacked by murderous hoodlums! A professional boxer -- who happens to be a friend of the unsociable Salandar -- just happens to be parked outside of Salandar's apartment when her roommate is kidnapped! And so on).

The books suffer from two other major problems that didn't really fit into the criticisms above. In the first place, they are far too long -- stuffed with entire subplots and characters who never amount to anything. In the second place, Larsson constantly violates the principle that you should develop your characters by showing their qualities, not telling about them. We are forever getting sentences like "Blomkvist was the sort of person who . . .", "Salandar always hated it when . . . " This type of hand-holding is not only tiresome and annoying -- it further reduces suspense by eliminating the need to work out the characters' personality from their behavior.

Given the many problems with these books, how can one account for their popularity? I suppose that for a certain type of person -- the sort of person who is convinced that Western governments are dominated by hateful right-wingers who do terrible things to women -- they serve the same purpose as Batman comics did for me when I was about 8. They are simplistic melodramas with some cool trappings and lots of violence. They ask nothing of the reader, but spoon-feed him both the plot developments and political attitudes that are very popular among PC types. And I think books like this -- especially if they are marketed well -- can always find an audience. Look at the success of Dan Brown, whose books suffer from many of the same flaws as Larsson's.

And I must say that while I didn't like these books, I am glad that the 20th-century artists who hated melodrama so much were unable to kill it. I am encouraged that even in our own supposedly "post-modern" time, so many highly-educated urban types are eager to curl up with a story about a good guy and a good girl who bravely take up arms against villainy. That remains a noble concept -- no matter how poorly it's developed.

Nevertheless, I do not recommend these books at all.