The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - Steig Larsson

Every year, for forty years, Henrick Vanger has received a single flower from an anonymous source on his birthday. He has no idea who is sending him these eerie gifts, but at eighty two he feels compelled to make one last effort to solve the mystery.

Mikael Blomkvist has earned himself a hefty fine and three months in prison. His financial magazine published his expose about a notoriously industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, only to find that Mikael’s accusations can not be substantiated. Tricked into a vulnerable position Mikael is unable to defend himself during the ensuing court case, where he is convicted of libel. When Henrick Vanger offers him the chance to clear his name if he finds out what happened to Henrick’s niece when she disappeared forty years ago, Mikael finds the offer odd but irresistible.

Then there’s Lisbeth Salander, an intensely private woman who is also vengeful, socially isolated and a meticulous freelance detective. Salander is brought in by Vanger’s lawyer to investigate Mikael before Vanger hires him, but the investigation is dropped when Mikael agrees to take the job. Mikael decides he needs some specialist help with the investigation into Harriet Vanger’s disappearance and Salander is contracted to help him.

‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ requires a bit of patience at first. Steig Larsson delves into the complex world of financial chicanery. The Vanger family is large and initially it can be hard to remember how all of them relate to each other, especially as several are dead and take no active part in the novel. Luckily Larsson understands how to explain a complex subject clearly and provides plenty of guidance about the financial matters. The reader is also carefully reminded of the structure of the Vanger family, without any loud, intrusive recaps, as Mikael struggles to remember the histories of the different family members.

For a large part of the novel Blomkvist and Salander are apart, each contained in a separate, intensely detailed story line. Both compel readers to pay close attention. Mikhael Blomkvist is a revolutionary in the field of financial journalism and his passion for integrity transform the dull world of figures into a place of conflict and drama. He also lives an unconventional lifestyle, engaged in an open relationship with his married business colleague. This partnership is conducted with such ease and friendship between the various people involved that readers may genuinely wonder why society is so opposed to open relationships.

Blomkvist may be rewriting the reputation of financial journalism, but it’s Salander who will make readers crave the sequel. She is first described as:

‘a pale, anorexic young woman who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about two centimeters long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle. On those occasions when she had been wearing a tank top, Armansky also saw that she had a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade. She was a natural redhead, but she dyed her hair raven black. She looked as though she had just emerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers.’

which makes her sound like an edgy, almost exotic figure, the personification of a certain type of male fantasy. However Salander is not your ordinary ass kicking, taking names female character, with a sexy vulnerable side, she is a character to be feared.
Larsson reveals only flashes of her at first, making her storyline tantalizingly unavailable. Then slowly, as the reader starts to realise what an extraordinary heroine Larsson is presenting, she begins to almost colonize the book until she is just as crucial a character as Mikael.

Salander has been placed under guardianship by the state, which believes her to be mentally deficient. When her guardian changes she finds her finances controlled by a sociopath intent on making Salander exchange sexual favours to retrieve her own money. Larsson reveals the vulnerable situation her legal status puts her in, then avoids making her a victim by enabling her to exact a tough and righteous justice outside of the law. Her isolation from society results in strong principles most of us wouldn’t be able to sustain and while Salander is not a character many women will probably admit to recognizing themselves in, as she exhibits severe social dysfunction and is often close to dangerously unstable, she is a character to respect and to cherish as an example of an avenging goddess made human. Larsson has taken a character who would traditionally be a heroine because of her status as a victim and made her strong, so strong that she is hard and almost unsympathetic. Then, as the novel progresses he encourages human feeling into her veins without weakening her essential power, to create a most complex female character who defies categorization.

‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ is a novel that wants to change the world in many ways. The first section the book begins with a statistic related to women and violence in Sweden ‘18% OF WOMEN IN SWEDEN HAVE AT ONE TIME BEEN THREATENED BY A MAN’ and each successive section begins with a statistic that progresses through a scale of violence, a device which links in with the increasing violence directed at women in the novel. Larsson wants to use his novel to highlight and denounce some of the most dangerous opinions in the world, so he creates a crime and a cast of characters involved in that crime that enable him to do so. It turns out that many members of the Vanger family were enmeshed with the Nazis and other facist parties. The crimes committed in the novel highlight the ways in which society’s prejudices consistently cause the authorities to fail women and place them in dangerous situations. Larsson takes on the Swedish legal system, the journalistic institutions and the system of industry in precise passages that deviate from the main action without feeling artificially inserted. These are big issues for a crime novel to address, but Larsson smoothly links worldwide issues with the individual crimes his characters discover. The result is a novel that often feels threatening, dark and troubling in a way that fits with the crime genre, but also feels as significant as a piece of political non-fiction.

One points before you start pushing people out of the way to get to the book. This is Swedish crime fiction, even if you haven’t read any of the recent crime translations from Sweden you probably know it has a bit of a reputation. I never really like to toss out warnings about books, I assume anyone reading here is big enough to take care of themselves and can make their own judgments about whether they’ll be able to handle certain subjects. Still, on this occasion I think I’ll just mention that there are a few scenes of sexual violence just because the details are a little out of the ordinary. There wasn’t anything that kept me awake but there were scenes that made me blink a bit faster. These scenes aren’t all about the criminals getting kicks though, one scene is an unforgettable act of justice that I personally think was worth buying the book for.

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