Men who hate "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

TITLE: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Original title Man Som Hatar Kvinnor): Millennium, Book 1
AUTHOR: Stieg Larsson/Translation by Reg Keeland
PUBLISHER: Quercus

RATING
5/5 “Full-body tattoos of Buddhist demons”; 4/5 “Chinese characters you can’t even read yourself”; 3/5 “Bands of any type”; 2/5 “Anything Celtic”; 1/5 “(Ex) Girlfriend’s names”
SCORE 3/5

Shrug. Sorry, that’s the best I can muster after finishing Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s serial bestseller, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I know, phenomenon like this tend to produce tsunami-wave cycles of popularity, of crest and trough, of adulation and backlash, and back again, pushing opinions to the extremes and drowning out the middle ground. Does anyone find the Twilight series, “OK, I guess”? How many people finished “The Da Vinci Code” and thought, “Ho hum”?

You can’t doubt “Girl” and the other two books that make up the Millennium trilogy are very much at the peak of the crest now. Last month Amazon announced Mr Larsson had become the first author to sell over one million e-books for the Kindle. The Huffington Post reports that sales of trilogy exceeded 30 million worldwide. But after wading through 500-plus pages of turgid exposition, choppy dialogue and wet characters, the most I can say for this book is, It’s OK, I guess. Ho hum.

I admit though, it is refreshing to read a novel set in such a little-known nation, and there’s no denying the old-world charm that rises like perfume from place-names like the Furusund Strait, Arholma, Gotgatan and Gamla stan. True, some of the cultural references may be hard to follow, such as to Sweden’s interest rate crises in the early 90s, but in a way that kind of adds to the enjoyment of experiencing something new and foreign. But that’s just about the only nice thing I can say about the book.

Much of the hype surrounding the Millennium series focuses on its characters, and they are the book’s first disappointment, but not its worst. Theoretically, the hero of the story is political/financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, but the publisher knew what they were about when they changed the title to focus on his partner, dragon-tattooed computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (the original Swedish title translates as “Men Who Hate Women”). It’s undoubtedly a smart publicity move, but sadly Salander, billed as a Goth-punk Bourne with an extra X chromosome, instead comes across as yet another fantasy figure, the kind of kick-ass girl introverts dream of dating, one whose real turn-on is diffidence. “Dammit, he had treated her like a human being” she thinks to herself before hopping into bed with Blomkvist.

If Salander is a disappointment, Blomkvist is a disaster. His defining characteristic is passivity. He’s accused of libel by a shady businessman, but refuses to defend himself, and is disgraced as a result. Luckily, he’s then hired by octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger to investigate the case of a child that disappeared 40 years previous, but for much of the book he manages to do little but drink coffee and have sex. Blomkvist’s only other character trait, you see, appears to be his alarmingly omnivorous sexual appetite. He sleeps with every single major female character in the book, a list that includes a woman half his age (Salander), the (married) editor-in-chief of the magazine he works for, as well as the (married but separated) niece of Henrik Vanger, a woman much closer to 60 than 16. For Mr Larsson, a journalist, to write about a journalist having such success with the ladies, will probably a too-transparent bit of wish fulfillment for some readers.

The other attraction the novel offers is its choice of themes. Here, the situation is somewhat better. The overriding theme, as the Swedish title suggests, is violence against women, especially sexual violence. Each part of the book begins with a grim statistic such as “48% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man”, and this carries over into Blomkvist and Salander’s investigation, as they turn up evidence (after much coffee-fuelled bed-hopping) that someone in Vanger’s family harbors a serious grudge against the opposite sex.

Mr Larsson has other irons in the fire as well. There’s his evident disgust with the cozy ties between financial journalists and their subjects, his hatred of both Sweden’s unrepentant Nazi movement and abuses of power, and perhaps more oddly, his airy dismissal of the role of stock exchanges. To be sure, Mr Larsson’s rage is evidently heartfelt, though Blomkvist’s sudden outbursts against these targets feel as though they come from the author rather than the character. Still, these doses of raw emotion help to enliven an otherwise lifeless plot.

The real drawback of the book, you see, is the positively somnolent progress from plot point to plot point. The convoluted backstory could probably have been dealt with in a fraction of the space. We learn a lot about the Vanger family but little that relates to the case. There’s a buildup of evidence but no corresponding narrowing of suspects, leaving the reader with nothing to get involved in, but instead watching the investigation at arm’s length. Just when the novel feels like it might be suddenly getting interesting—a Dan Brown mystery for grown-ups—Mr Larsson suddenly shifts gears, reveals the culprit and then just as quickly kills him off. The remaining 100 pages are an entirely unnecessary epilogue in which Blomkvist gets his revenge on the man who framed him in the libel case.

Partly, I suspect, this long-windedness is the result of the book’s rather unique genesis. As most of you will know, Mr Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after delivering the manuscripts of the series to his publisher (this wouldn’t sound nearly so eerie if he’d written, say, a work of adult erotica, but hey). So bang went any chance of give-and-take between editor and writer as they sought to hone the work into the finished product. Would you want to delete a dead man’s words? No? So that’s very much what it feels like we’re getting, a raw, unvarnished manuscript, one showing lots of promise but lots of rough edges, too.