I’d read so many good things about this novel – in the press and from otherwise respectable people on Twitter – that I thought I’d give it a try. Unfortunately this Swedish murder mystery is terrible. It’s badly written, it’s poorly structured and, worse than either of those, it’s dull.
Larsson was a left-wing journalist who originally set out to write a series of ten murder mysteries. He died after completing just three. The parallels with Sjowall and Wahloo are obvious but while the Martin Beck series relishes the banality of police work and yet remains compelling, Larsson’s debut is sensationalist and action-packed but thoroughly boring. Where Sjowall and Wahloo are playful and subtle, Larsson is po-faced and blunt.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (TGWTDT) has three sections. In the first, Mikael Blomkvist, a principled, crusading financial reporter at Millennium magazine, is disgraced when he loses a libel action to a wealthy industrialist, Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.
In the second section Blomkvist is approached by Henrik Vanger, another wealthy industrialist whose grand-niece, Harriet, disappeared 40 years earlier. Vanger, convinced Harriet was murdered, asks Blomkvist to solve the mystery, under the guise of writing a biography of the Vanger family.
In the final section, Blomkvist gets his revenge on Wennerstrom and saves Millennium magazine for another sequel. Throughout all this Blomkvist is aided by Lisbeth Salander, a dysfunctional punk and hacker who gives the book its title. Salander is anti-social and lives life on the margins but, like seemingly every other woman in the novel is unable to resist the lure of the middle-aged and charmless Blomkvist.
There aren’t many plot holes but the structure is slack and the book could easily lose 100 pages or more without consequence.
The first section of the book is quite promising, despite Larsson’s clumsy labouring of the point that violence against women is a bad thing. That’s hardly the most penetrating observation but nevertheless Larsson begins each chapter with some worthy statistics. One, claiming that 18 per cent of Swedish women have at some time been threatened by a man is followed later by news that 46 per cent of Swedish women have been subjected to violence by a man. Both alarming stats, to be sure, but how is it possible for more women to be actually assaulted than threatened?
The middle section is like a different novel, and a really, really bad one. Larsson piles one serial killer thriller cliche onto another as Blomkvist investigates Harriet’s disappearance.
[Skip the next paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers...]
He uncovers a serial killer guided by the Book of Leviticus who trains his son to be a serial killer too. While the father is a slavering maniac, the son becomes one of those ice-cold evil genius serial killers who has a torture room in his basement and disposes of his victims at sea to ensure they’ll never be found.
While this sort of thing might cause Thomas Harris to wake up stuck to the sheets, to me it just sounds laughably daft. If it was mooted as an ITV weeknight thriller, even Robson Greene would consider it beneath him.
Moreover, this kind of schlock writing gives the impression that Larsson’s message about violence against women is there simply to lend legitimacy to the very silly plot. First, in the real world most women are abused by husbands, boyfriends, fathers and brothers rather than by cackling serial killers. Second, the victims in this book are all anonymous and interchangeable. The empathy created by Sjowall and Wahloo in Roseanna or by Bolano in 2666 is entirely missing here.
It’s a woefully shallow piece of work. Larsson’s dialogue is wooden and his characters are underdeveloped. Only Salander is fully realised and, to me at least, she seems like a cartoon or video game character who has wound up in a novel by mistake. Her presence just makes the story more implausible.
In that context, Larsson’s constant parade of statistics begins to make sense. He doesn’t have the skill as a novelist to make his point through the story so he needs stats to do it for him instead.
There is some truly awful writing in places too. In one scene Salander’s mother watches “sadly and anxiously” as her daughter leaves. Larsson ends the scene with the wretched: “It was as if she had a premonition of some approaching disaster.”
Overall though, Larsson is simply lazy. The third and final section of the book is mostly just a list of events recounted in emails. It feels like the writer just can’t wait to get finished.
I can’t say I blame him. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is terrible; the worst book I’ve read all year.
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Comments
11 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.I’m glad to find someone else who was unimpressed by this- after all the hype, I was sorely disappointed. The writing and dialogue, the characters, the plot… I certainly won’t be reading the other two!
I am immediately suspicious of anything that is as popular as this set of books. After reading this, I can safely continue ignoring them.
Thank goodness someone agrees with me about this awful book. The only thing worse that I can imagine would be reading the god=awful magazine the protagonist works for!
Totally agree. This is a terrible, terribnle book without any redeeming features at all. It is pure drivel. The plot is dull, the characters completely one-dimensional and both the prose and dialogue are truly amateurish. The most bizarre thing I found though is the use of product placement in a novel – truly weird inane descriptions of the wonders of Apple… How anyone can compare this to great literature is beyond me – execrable!
Phew! Thank god! I’m halfway through the book and doing an internet search to see if anything that isn’t dull and repetetive is going to happen. I sometimes feel compelled to continue reading until the end even if I’m getting wound up by the total banality of a book, like I am with this one. Now I’ve found out the real truth, I feel released and can stop reading. Why is this rubbish so popular? Mind you, The DaVinci code was an all time best seller and I threw it in the bin a quarter of the way through, so I guess popularity means nothing. Can anyone recommend a
good
book?
I got through 3 chapters and could not torture myself any more. This article sums up my feelings about it, in a humourous way:
http://www.improper.com/columns/stockholm-syndrome/
I also concur. There was possibly the makings of a good story in there somewhere, if it didn’t have to be so unspeakably horrible, and its either a very poor translation, or needed massive editing that no-one wanted to do because the original author had died. But overall if I want a good mystery I’d rather read a Robert Goddard novel.
Quite a bit of the assumed sloppiness of the prose and cliche litterings can be attributed to a translation from a language with many nuances not present in English
Contrary to the above comments I thoroughly enjoyed the trilogy; the first book was definitely superior and I appreciate the second was the worst of the three but I felt the story moved along quickly and was gripping. The films are not worth watching as the screenplay writer has omitted and changed copious amounts of the original stories. Of course the hype has increased people’s expectations and can only result in disappointment.
It would seem many people here are ready to throw this book in the trash and the author along with it. For those who are ready to dismiss Larrsen’s fiction as pure drivel I’d like to point out the fact that it is equally shallow, cliched and simplistic for those of a self proclaimed intellectual elite to want to critically destroy any and all fiction that is commercially successful. Despite Larrsen’s shortcomings he obviously accomplished something some “literary” writers cannot: he struck a powerful chord in his audience and created interesting characters they cared about.
Works like this ought to be criticized for what they are, not what they’re not. The novel makes no pretense of being a literary masterpiece. It’s a thriller. Thrillers are meant to THRILL. Completely plausible characters are often also boring ones. Part of the thriller genre is cliche, is larger than life characters and a re-imagining of conventions.
But one need not rely on that logic entirely to defend Larssen’s work. In many ways he violates cliche in his depiction of the relationship between Michael and Lisbeth. She is the dominant, sexually aggressive one capable of dramatic and heroic acts of bravery despite her small size. Michael plays the feminine role, Lisbeth the masculine. Michael is inept in many ways and thus turns the convention of the damsel in distress on its head.
lol, man the people who comment on how much they hate this book are funny, but not intentionally. i have to read this for my english class and i’ve never read a book i wasn’t required to. with that said this one isn’t so bad. a lot of different conflicts keep me intrigued. it’s a little sexual but i mean whatever we’re all adults here. i think you have to be intelligent to be able to appreciate this book though or else some things might go over your head. i don’t really like salandar as much as the author intends for her to grow on us cuz of her little gang. i’m not much a fan of satanists.