The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson (released 12/03/2010)
I did a very naughty thing while reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I sneaked a peek at the end before I got there. I know, I know, it was a terrible thing to do. But knowing the ending in no way spoiled the remainder of the novel for me, and really only confirmed what I already suspected from the onset of the novel. I was about half way through when I cheated, and the knowledge I gained only made me want to read on further. I hadn’t quite reached the stage where Blomkvist and Salander come together so I was still wondering when I was going to hit the point at which the two narratives intertwine and how it comes about, and a lot of the finer details aren’t mentioned in the last few pages (which I only skimmed anyway) so there was a lot still to discover in the pages ahead of me.
One of the benefits of cheating, however, was that I could watch the film without concern that the ending would be ruined for me and I wouldn’t want to continue with the book. I’m sure this made my boyfriend rather happy as he’d been wanting to see the film for a while and was starting to get impatient with my stubborn refusal to watch the film until I’d finished the book. And it wasn’t a bad adaptation, at the end of the day.
Normally I’m quite scathing of book-to-film adaptations as they gloss over details that are actually quite important (although not crucial) to the plot and the development of the characters and things, but the team behind the film adaptation didn’t do a half bad job with it. They included some of the things I thought they would have dismissed and then alluded to later, like the incidents with Salander and Advokat Bjurman, and tactfully omitted some things that were just a fraction more disturbing than the normal person can cope with in a film of this genre.
They also did a few things that, now I’ve reached the end of the book, I don’t really agree with. Throughout the novel, Larssen’s narrative describes Harriet Vanger as brunette, dying her hair blonde as part of her disguise, but throughout the film she appears as what I reluctantly call the “stereotypical” aryan Scandinavian - blonde. I know it’s only a minor niggle, but considering that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a thriller, I would have thought that getting all the details accurate and not running away with the privilege of artistic license would have been quite important. The other thing I disagreed with, which I only discovered upon finishing the novel, was that the film apparently fabricates a root for the reason Salander is so asocial and unconventional an individual. I have to admit that throughout the novel I suspected some unusual parenting to be the cause of her problems, particularly on the part of her father, who is rarely if ever mentioned in the written text, and perhaps when I get into the sequels of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I will discover that the film has merely jumped the gun by revealing the catalyst for Salander’s unfortunate existence a little too soon, but again, to me the production team for the film have abused their artistic license a bit with this fabrication. The most important thing in any adaptation is to remain true to the text, is it not?
The other thing about the film, which isn’t really to do with the making of it at all but is more an observation, was that I sort of didn’t expect it to be delivered in Swedish (with English subtitles) or with English dubbing. Considering the phenomenon that the Millenium trilogy have become in the literature world, I perhaps naively thought the film would be delivered in English. The fact that it isn’t, for me, is actually quite refreshing. It’s a tremendous post-humous compliment to Larsson for his novel to be adapted to a film delivered in his native tongue, and more superficially I always feel like I’m being a bit more cultured and intellectual when I watch something with subtitles. Reading what the characters are saying and still managing to keep up with the visuals affirms my ability to multitask and makes me feel pretty good about life. That said, because it was late(ish) in the day and I had the beginnings of a cold and wasn’t watching it alone so the general consensus went against me, I watched the film in English out of sheer laziness. Which brings me to my next comment - the English dubbing was excellent and almost seamless. The only way I would have known that it was dubbed would have been if I had taken the time to carefully read the lips of each and every character and frankly, that’s a nerdy step too far for me.
And so onto the novel. Interestingly, even though I was only halfway through the book when I caved and watched the film and so knew what was going to happen at the end, I still didn’t feel as though I could give up, assured that I knew the ending and it was fine. I was still eager to read my way to the end and discover what happened for myself, the way it was originally intended to be told. Novels always provide such a richer experience for me in comparison to their film counterparts and thrillers are a fairly new experience for me after a lifetime of classics, so I was determined to see this novel through to the end and glean all the richness I could from this novel. The way the two storylines of Salander and Blomkvist eventually intertwine (thankfully at just the point when I was starting to get frustrated that the plot hadn’t come together and was doubting my initial praise of the book) is well thought out and plausible, and in fact, now I really think about it, there is nothing in this novel that I would consider to be infeasible. All of it could have, without too much of a stretch of the imagination, happened in real life. The connections between the murders and the twist at the end was genius and I can only stand in awe and a little concern and the magnitude of Larsson’s imagination for putting together such a comprehensive and unusual plot. It isn’t very often in a novel that every detail the reader is given, in one way or another, plays a part in the solution of the mystery, and all I can say is “wow”.
Obviously it hasn’t escaped my notice that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was translated into English from Swedish, and I would like to conclude by taking a few lines to praise the quality of the translation by Reg Keeland. It must have taken him a ridiculously long time to work through the 533 pages of Larsson’s novel and he really has done an incredible job. I don’t speak Swedish, and it may be that Swedish translates more fluidly and easily into English than languages like German or French, which follow different syntactic structures to my own mother-tongue, but this is irrelevant really as it cannot be denied that Keeland has translated Larsson’s original text with such precision that one could easily make the mistake that this novel was written in English in the first place. There were only as many occassions as I could count on one hand where I thought that something in the translation was a little archaic and made me wince ever so slightly so overall, it was an excellent effort.
I really enjoyed both the film and the novel of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I wasn’t sure what to expect considering my limited knowledge of the thriller genre and my general abhorrence of all things sinister and gory, but I really, genuinely loved this. Larsson handles what could be mindlessly gory scenes with tact and allusion to keep the focus where it belongs on the mystery at hand and not the warped pastimes of the characters, and I’m itching to get stuck into The Girl Who Played With Fire. I only hope that I can get a significant chunk of the way through it before I start my MA course next week…
Larsson, Stieg [2005] The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2008) London: Quercus
