Submitted by Bethanne on Mon, 07/27/2009 - 8:43am
The phenomenal 2008 success of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” led to a 300,000 copy print run for Larsson’s second book in his “Millennium Trilogy,” “The Girl Who Played with Fire.” Building on the success of each previous book is important to the novels in this small group, because there may never be any others from this author. Larsson, a well-known Swedish magazine editor and political activist, died prematurely of a heart attack in 2004.
So, does “The Girl Who Played with Fire” warrant its fanfare? The answer must take a slightly circuitous route through the first book. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was the well-titled and oddly paced story of a Swedish magazine editor named Mikael Blomkvist, whose stumbles in an expose of a famous financier leave him ready for a sabbatical after he and his publisher Erika Berger (the married Berger is also his longtime friend and lover) decide he should get out of town for a while until the libel suit calms down.
Fortunately for Blomkvist, and as the reader has already learned, there is trouble brewing in the small, rural town of Hedeby, where electronics giant The Vanger Corporation has its headquarters. Nearly all of the Vanger family members live in or near Hedeby (closest town: Hedestad), setting Blomkvist up for a classic “locked-room” mystery. (For those readers who groan, thinking the locked-room form saw its day in British mysteries of the early twentieth century, please see P.D. James’s masterful “The Lighthouse.” The form survives because it’s irresistible.)
Woven into the hints of chaos in Hedeby and Blomkvist’s midlife crisis are bits and pieces of a story about an unusual young woman named Lisbeth Salander. Salander is under some kind of legal guardianship (we don’t know why) and visits a mother who is incapacitated (we don’t know why). When her avuncular guardian suffers a stroke, she is placed under the care of another one, Nils Bjurman. Bjurman quickly turns out to be a villain of the most pathetic sort, and Salander turns into a proto-feminist heroine.
Obviously, Blomkvist and Salander are destined to meet. And they will. And their entanglement will not only end this novel, but lead inexorably to the next. But first, Larsson has a great deal of explaining to do – about Blomkvist, about his mission, about the Vanger family, and about the mystery at the family’s center.
Fast-forward to “The Girl Who Played with Fire:” In this second, rather different novel, Larsson has largely finished with his scene-setting and puts Salander front and center. The book opens with Lisbeth finishing up a kind of exile with a bang: She’s holing up at a posh Grenada resort when Hurrican Matilda hits. There are other bangs involved, too, but: No spoilers here.
With her temporary island home in tatters, Salander decides to head back to Sweden. It seems to be an ideal solution. She has the means to live well and a person for whom she cares deeply to visit (hint: It’s not Blomkvist). Larsson spends a lot of time telling us about her settling-in period, just as he did for Blomkvist in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” He seems oddly enamored of brand names (IKEA upholstery models, e.g.; he mentions “Billy’s Pan Pizza” so many times in this book that it smacks of product placement). The idea may be to show how desperately Salander wants a normal life, but there’s far too much exterior detail and far too little interior reality to feel this.
Meanwhile, we learn that the previously humiliated Bjurman wants revenge against Salander in the worst way, and the information he possesses can somehow destroy her. It’s even more difficult than it was in the first book to keep all of the characters straight (just give in to the tongue-twisting Swedish place- and sur-names), especially as there are plenty of “extras” this time around, from police detectives to employees at Millennium magazine.
It’s important, since Larsson did after all deem this the “Millennium Trilogy,” to consider the place of that magazine in the mysteries and as an entity. Millennium magazine is supposed to be an intellectual muckraking enterprise, a magazine that dares to tell the truth about the underpinnings of Swedish society. One of the best parts of Larsson’s books is the time he devotes to the magazine staff: These scenes don’t just have veracity, but also a sort of urgency, the kind that is hard to imagine these days for any American print publication (we have to remember that Larsson was writing his books in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the death of print was not quite spelled out).
Even when Larsson clumsily shows his cards (we know from the moment one young woman thinks about her pregnancy that she is doomed), characters like the loyal Blomkvist, the nervous Berger, and the completely singular Salander make reading a pleasure. You truly want to know what happens to the oddly moral “Girl,” and what happened to make her such a scarred yet brilliant person.
So yes, this new mystery from Stieg Larsson is worth reading. Is it worth all of its fanfare? That may not be something anyone can say until the third book has been published. With this volume, it becomes clearer that Larsson was putting together a complicated puzzle and holding many key pieces back. "The Girl Who Played with Fire" depends on its predecessor, but it is also a very different novel. The narrative isn't as choppy, the central mystery is no longer of the "locked room" type, and the social concerns have morphed from National Socialism and corporate greed to the National Health system and gang activity (the problem of violence against women remains, which may be part of Larsson's comment on that evil).
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Definitely worth reading
Joanne, like you, I enjoyed both books despite my inner cries of "Oh, obvious!" and "Get on with it..." Larsson really has created two compelling characters in Salander and Blomkvist. You'll enjoy THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE. BTW, Entertainment Weekly has a short piece this week about Larsson and the controversy over his fourth, unfinished manuscript.
Exactly what I needed
Thanks for this review, Bethanne. I enjoyed "Tattoo" almost despite myself, and was wondering whether the follow-on books were going to be worth reading. Sounds like this one is, at least to learn more about Lisbeth, who was definitely the most intriguing character (thank goodness, since she was the title character!). Perhaps I'll pick it up for our long drive this weekend!
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