‘Dragon Tattoo’ Girl Survives Bullet in Brain, Faces Evil Spies
Swedish journalist and author Stieg Larsson. He is the best-selling writer of the Millennium Trilogy featuring computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. Photographer: Britt-Marie Trensmar via Bloomberg
"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest"
Knopf via Bloomberg
The cover of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," by Steig Larsson. His book "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," one of the Millennium Trilogy, was a huge, international best-seller.
The cover of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," by Steig Larsson. His book "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," one of the Millennium Trilogy, was a huge, international best-seller. Source: Knopf via Bloomberg
Lisbeth Salander, aka “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” may be Sweden’s biggest cultural export since ABBA.
The surly, heavily pierced computer hacker stars in the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, which has sold 40 million copies around the world and spawned a Swedish movie that will soon be remade by Hollywood.
I wish I had better news for Larsson’s fans, but his last book, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” has all the drawbacks of his first two and few of the thrills.
“Dragon Tattoo” is the best of Larsson’s novels. Here, Salander’s story is an intriguing background to several puzzles she’s trying to solve along with magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist. The book is a surprising combination of closed-room mystery, high-finance thriller and serial-killer hunt with a number of truly twisted plot twists.
Larsson’s oddly flat prose and reliance on coincidence --as well as his tendency to go on for several hundred pages too many -- become more grating in “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which gives up the distraction of an outside mystery to concentrate entirely on the enigmas of Salander’s life.
Why did she get locked up in a mental hospital when she was 12? What turned her into the antisocial freak she is in her 20s? Blomkvist must answer these questions to prevent Salander from being sent away for three murders she didn’t commit (at least, he doesn’t think she committed them), but she doesn’t seem to want his help.
Bullet in the Brain
At the end of “Fire,” Salander is shot in the head by her evil father -- a former Russian spy who’s being protected by a cabal inside the Swedish secret police -- and retaliates by whacking him with an axe. She makes a remarkable recovery in “Hornet’s Nest,” which picks up later the same night.
When she awakens in the hospital after brain surgery, she finds only one mental gap: She knows she solved Fermat’s Last Theorem shortly before the shooting, but can’t remember quite how she did it.
The reader immediately spots a gap in Larsson’s plotting, however. How can Salander possibly be two rooms down from her father in the hospital? They’re both under arrest, but neither has a locked door or an armed guard, and despite their severe head trauma, both take to sneaking out of bed at night with no one noticing.
Salander spends most of the book in bed, connected to the world only by a Palm Tungsten (how quaint!) that Blomkvist gets her doctor to smuggle in. The reader is left contending with parallel investigations by the police, the secret police, the private security service where Salander used to work, and Blomkvist’s magazine.
Opaque Directions
Some of them cooperate with each other, some don’t. Sometimes it’s impossible to remember who belongs to which team, and Larsson’s inert prose doesn’t help:
“Martensson left home at 7:40 that morning. He got into his Volvo and drove towards the city but turned off to go across Stora Essingen and Grondal into Sodermalm. He drove down Hornsgatan and across to Bellmansgatan via Brannkyrkagatan. He turned left onto Tavastgatan at the Bishop’s Arms pub and parked at the corner.”
Maybe that paragraph conjures a vivid, meaningful picture in the minds of Stockholm residents, but to the rest of us it’s incomprehensible. There isn’t nearly enough awe-inspiring action in “Hornet’s Nest” to make up for the slog.
“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” is published by Knopf (563 pages, $27.95). To buy this book in North America, click here.
(Laurie Muchnick is an editor for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Laurie Muchnick in New York at lmuchnick@bloomberg.net.
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