The Girl Who Played With Fire - Stieg Larsson
About a week ago I read an article in the Guardian that talked about how the partner of the late Stieg Larsson, who apparently has been left with nothing because she and Larsson weren’t married and so his assets reverted to his family, is intending to finish a fourth installment of Larsson’s Millennium saga. I cannot express how irritated this announcement made me. The Millennium series is a trilogy. The key element there being tri; THREE. Larsson wrote three books. Trilogy complete. No need to expand it. Equally, by the by, I’m rather annoyed at the fourth Pirates film, since that was supposed to be a trilogy too. Opinions may differ on this, but I rather think that it would be a better tribute to Larsson’s memory to preserve what work he did complete exactly as it is and not transform it into a phenomenon that rides the waves of success then fizzles out into an “OK, they’ve gone too far with this now” type thing, like Shrek. J.K Rowling has preserved the Harry Potter phenomenon from being taken too far; I’m sure its possible NOT to write a fourth Millennium and therefore save the adventures of Salander from becoming those of, as one commenter wittily observed, The Girl Who Scraped the Barrel.
But, we aren’t here to talk about that. Yesterday, after months of sneaking the odd chapter here and there around uni reading, I finally finished The Girl Who Played With Fire. I had high hopes for this novel after enjoying The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo so much, and even Edward Docx’s comments about formula fiction failed to put me off this. I have to find things out for myself, and find I did. I have to admit that, in the end, I was a bit disappointed by The Girl Who Played With Fire. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very strong sequel, but I found myself feeling rather indifferent at the end. I didn’t hate it, but neither did I feel immediately compelled to dive into The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest. I had the final installment of the trilogy ready to pick up, but it took me a couple of hours to psyche myself up to jumping back into my self-crafted Larsson-fest.
The problem with The Girl Who Played With Fire is that, for the most part, I was bored. Larsson spends nearly 200 pages detailing Salander’s adventures in the Caribbean, which have virtually no relevance to the eventual focus of the plot, before slamming in a murder scene, identifying Salander as the key suspect (relax, I’m not spoiling it; read the blurb) and then dribbling away again until suddenly everything comes together in the last 50 or so pages and rockets up to a dizzyingly intense series of dramatic scenes. I took the liberty of drawing a graph to chart my interest/excitement throughout the novel:
Perhaps drawing the reader in slowly is just a technique that Larsson uses to build suspense, but I’m afraid it didn’t really do it for me. Suspense is good, but waiting 200 pages of a 569 page novel for anything important to happen is a lot of wasted eye-time, especially when the action, when it finally comes, seems anticlimactic in comparison to the build up. But perhaps that’s just a problem with my generation of reader. We have been taught to expect the unexpected from a plot, that the culprit is never the most obvious suspect, and so nothing surprises us anymore and everything is disappointing.
I also felt that Larsson’s narrative style was verging on becoming a bit dull. He seems to invest a lot of time in describing what people wear, what their furniture is like, what groceries they keep in their fridge, etc., and frankly, I don’t really care about these things. Does it matter to me that Larsson has described every single piece of Ikea furniture that Salander purchases for her flat? Does her choice in furniture say anything about her character? Or bear a relevance to the plot? No, no and… no. Nobody goes crashing through her desk or bleeds all over her bedlinen and all it tells us about Salander is that she lives in Sweden, the land that boasts the inception of flat-packed furniture. It reminded me a little of American Psycho, which pays a ridiculous amount of attention to the minor details of every single outfit every single character wears. And I didn’t like American Psycho. Yes, the little details build up a strong picture in the mind of the reader and make the book more clearly adaptable to film, but they can detract horribly from the impact of a scene. When Modig is disturbed in bed at 4am and instructed to immediately travel across Sweden to the scene of the latest developments, do we really care that she chooses to wear a mis-matched suit with a red coat? No, we want to know what happens when she gets to the scene of the crime!
There are also a LOT of characters in the novel, which can be quite tricky to get your head round when several names are milling about and it isn’t clear who is who. This is especially true of the Svavelsjo blokes. Niedermann the “giant” isn’t given a name until quite a way into the novel and I didn’t make the connection that the giant who attacks Salander and Niedermann were the same person perhaps as quickly as I ought to have done.
However, some of the characters are wonderfully developed. Larsson clearly put quite a lot of time into evolving some of the characters who appear in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo into believable people to give their roles a sense of worth. Blomkvist’s sometimes lover, Erika Berger, for example, is developed to a much greater extent even though her role in the novel doesn’t appear to be of any greater importance than in the first novel. Salander’s history gets quite a lot of page-time as well, which is a bit of a double edged sword. While it would have been immensely unsatisfying to get two thirds of the way through a trilogy without knowing anything about the character on whom the plot focusses, it would have different and quirky to leave her a complete mystery, unlikeable and full of secrets that not even the narrator is privy to. It seems as though, after not really caring throughout The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Larsson suddenly develops conscience here and strives rather hard to justify Salander’s character and force the reader to sympathise with her and like her.
Despite all the faults I’ve identified here, I am quite looking forward to getting properly stuck into The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest. From what little I’ve scaled so far, it appears to pick up exactly where Played With Fire leaves off and I think it will make a good concluding segment of the Millennium trilogy. I’m not entirely without my doubts about it; at over 700 pages it’s longer than the first two installments and if Larsson doesn’t find some narrative pace from somewhere to balance the action and tension then it could be a frustrating read, but we will see.
