The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

#341
Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Author: Stieg Larsson
Year: 2009
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
590 pages

I know that many people really like this, and all of Scandinavia and Northern Europe is swamped with displays hawking copies of all three books in the series in multiple languages. There were aspects of it that I liked. At its best, it was weirdly like an amalgam of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy with the gory parts of Kellerman's The Butcher's Theater. Overall, however, it simply alternated between flat and vile.

The characters are dimensionless and largely interchangeable. They all sound alike. This first volume is a long revenge fantasy in several parts, unsatisfying because it is unrealistic. In this way it reads structurally and thematically like romance or pornography, despite the lengths it goes to to establish its realism through historical and technological detail. It almost seemed like a collaboration rather than the work of a single author due to repeated abrupt changes of focus and level of detail. Unfortunately, the most detailed and consistent descriptions are of brutal rapes, which the narration ostensibly decries but lingers over lovingly. The effect is that of pornography that arouses the writer while he is writing, or the pornography of earlier eras that attempts the pretense of medical case report.

I am not a reader who tries to figure out mysteries. I'm not good at it, and I enjoy being surprised. I was largely unsurprised here. I knew Harriet wasn't dead. I knew she sent the flowers. I knew she had been sexually abused or raped, probably by a family member. I knew the woman in the window helped her escape. That Salander was autistic. That she was sexually abused. That she would help Blomqvist take down Wennerstrom. I knew that there was a succession of more than one murderer. All that really left was whether Harriet was Salander's mother and who the second criminal was. Note to author: Exposition along the lines of "Martin is very rational; oops, no he's not, he's a big old Biblically-driven freak like his father; why is that, well, who can say?" is really unsatisfying and contemptuous of your reader. "Oh, well, he's nuts" is about as irritating as, "Ooh, it was all a dream!" No. Not satisfactory.

There are a number of other irritants and inconsistencies, but I will identify only one: Harriet drops everything and moves back to the family that didn't save her? Really? And instantly turns around the ailing company? Really? Not.

Don't get me started on professional ethics. I could write a treatise.

Do reread Citizen of the Galaxy, toss in a little Kellermanesque sexualized snuff, and buy one of Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking books instead. They, too, are ubiquitous in Sweden.