Some say it’s not serious literature. Others say it goes to the heart of our times. In any case, there is no question that Stieg Larsson’s three volume work, the Millennium trilogy has brought the high flying movement of Swedish crime fiction to its pinnacle, becoming one of the most discussed literary works on the planet. It is understandable that some people are asking whether these books of crime fiction, with their forays into violent worlds and one famous exploitation scene deserve all this attention, from radio talk shows, to major book reviews, university courses and in book clubs everywhere.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Men Who Hate Women, in the original Swedish),
The Girl Who Played with Fire, and
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest constitute a new world view and a new perspective: a post-modern sort of macho feminism. They are hard-hitting enough that on the Diane Rehm show on NPR, the book discussion was criticized by at least one caller who criticized the host for featuring a book that she termed “exploitation,” and indicated that furthermore this genre of fiction is not real literature.
Before we begin our discussion of this disturbing and engaging trilogy, let us put that part to rest. In Stieg Larsson’s writing, at the end of his life, there is much use of paradox, and a sense of potent style which evades either Dan Brown or Steven King, never mind that his post-humus sales have now equaled theirs. A close look at the Swedish and not just the allegedly more “ornate” English version—dabbled with by a famous publisher (causing the translator to change his name in the credits)—bears out the assertion that this strange combination of brashness and literary style works in both languages.
For those who know Swedish and Scandinavian writers, the switch from the high literary sensibilities of August Strindberg and Pär Lagerkvist, Selma Lagerlöf and even the films films of Ingmar Bergman – the screenplays for which had high literary pretentions – the works of the driven recently deceased Swedish investigative journalist and author are brashly hard hitting. They take us into the shoes of outcasts, the outsiders, and places under a microscope the hypocrisy of major media in its prurient chase after marketable news and the collusion of the media with powerful economic interests. By exploring the dark underbelly of that “innocent small country” of Sweden we love to hate (for its medical care, social services and sheltering of refugees) and alternatively idealize (for the same things) we gain some lightning insights about our not-so-innocent selves here in the heart of a world empire.
Larsson’s fiction has something much in common with the genres of the crime novel and the international intrigue (as in the works of John Le Carré). The fact is they are a different subgenre. A regular crime novel of international intrigue is a puzzle, usually with some very strange psychological quirks residing in the detective, or spy, added in. Larsson's novels are not centered on the detective or the crime solvers. The investigators are a team of sorts in the first book – but they are not police nor decetives. They are rebels, and exquisite experts in their fields, but they think outside the box. In fact, they are out and out renegades. No more Swedish Ikea milquetoast. (In each novel Ikea gets a mention in a sort of nod to its pervading bland influence. Ironically, the renegades use it most – including the muckraking Millenium magazine.) Mikael Blomkvist, is a writer for a magazine similar to Larson’s: the former exposes corporate influence in politics, the latter exposed neofascist organizations in Europe and their links with powerful sources. Blomkvist's accidental partner in all of this, Lisbeth Salander, is a highly sensitive and iconoclastic computer and hacking genius, perhaps living with Asberger’s syndrome in a highly creative way. She is a victim of horrifying abuse, which is both generated by her family life – and in an astonishingly creative leap on Larson’s part – international geopolitics.
Unlike Conan Doyle, or that other contemporary genius of crime novels from Sweden, Henning Mankell—whose long series about the obsessive and neurotic master police detective Wallendar, has already won world wide acclaim for the masters of the “Swedish genre” – these investigators are not authorized by anyone to be such. Blomkvist goes to jail in volume one for his correct evaluation of the activities of a high-powered corporate CEO – his proof is just not conclusive enough. Salander is a neo-punk ward of the state, deprived of usual rights for a supposed past of uncontrollable violence. Together these two will solve the first set of crimes of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, forming an unlikely alliance, and a mysterious bond that will last through the series.
These are books that go to the shadow side. Literary fiction and modernism often takes us to the refined side of consciousness . These novels are the shadow side – the dark side if you will – much more than the conventional crime novel. This is a place we need to go to see the truth about ourselves and our world.
These novels strike me as being of the most serious intent: they are neither pure entertainment, nor exploitation books. Larson managed, with increasing success in these books, to become something of a real stylist, and poses a lot of provocative puzzles and paradoxes about life in these, our times. The attitudes toward women are a barometer of our progress or lack thereof.
Yet, in addition, the truth belongs to those, according to Carl Jung who can look at the shadow side. If one critic here commented that the Swedes in their apparent social paradise “Look a lot more like us” in these books – it’s not that we aren’t a society more beset by violence and hatreds than Sweden. Almost any objective sociologist would say we are. Yet the fact that these phenomena exist everywhere, and seize control of our behavior, our politics and our sense of “right conduct” in business and politics is something that cannot be denied.
Stieg Larsson seems to have come to believe – as a journalist or editor like Mikael Blomkvist (though he did exposes on racist, skinhead and Nazi organizations rather than corporate criminals and various mafia networks) that one can probe and measure the degree to which society is violent or corrupted in the way women are seen.
An interesting corollary to this is the theatre--or circus--that is playing out aorund these books in Sweden.
Sweden does have a more compassionate approach to care of the elderly and sick than we do. But they have a little oversight buried in their laws. Common law spouses have no rights. Eva Gabrielson, who supported Larsson on his magazine of exposés while living with him for about three decades, was denied all rights and royalties to his works. Larsson’s father and brother have set up shop marketing and making millions of the trilogy. Many Swedes are shocked. One journalist at TTB (Sweden’s equivalent of Reuters) has perhaps gone too far when he remembers Larsson as a graphic journalist who had terrible difficulty writing, and publically suggested that Gabrielson may have been the main writer. Most Swedish critics think this goes too far. It is true that, as home and work partners, and with Gabrielson as a talented writer and journalist, the likelihood that she assisted or advised on the manuscripts are great. Larsson’s father and brother have claimed they made her a good offer: that she could keep the apartment. They find her unreasonable. Why? There is most of the draft of a new novel by Larsson on her laptop, and she will not give it up. “All they want is to make lots of money,” she complained. That’s how simple it is, in fact.
She seems to have a strong sense that Larson was on a broader mission. He wrote all three books on spec, they were not published while he was alive, and he hadn’t the slightest clue they had the potential to make him as rich as his two relentless relatives have become now. They have no interest in the deeper significance of these books. For his part, Larsson’s father said a while back that Gabrielson will never get anything in all of this because “She has no testicals.” Gabrielson is holding onto the laptop in some secret place – it will not see the light of day, she says. She also warns there is something coming: a book of her own covering her own life during those years. There is something of Lisbeth Salandar in Eva Gabrielson. The firm and more grounded part of her resemble Kalle Blomqvist’s editor and lover in the trilogy.
To my mind the central phenomenon in these books is the social outcast Lisbeth Salander. She begins as an ambiguous character, with a tough attitude bred of necessity – a punk goth anarchic streak that makes her fascinating. We soon discover that she is a genius – in even the genuine sense of the word (when she flees Sweden and roams the world in volume two, for a good while she is reading a volume on higher mathematics for pleasure). By the end of volume two,
The Girl Who Played with Fire, we see that she is a force to contend with. In that second novel she will be absent from the lives of the central characters including Mikael Blomkvist – for maybe 400 pages in the Swedish version. Yet, in her very absence, her character, without being any sort of portentious punk Jedi knight (well, she has a few of those traits, and she toys with the dark side occassionally) – hovers over the book, dominates lives, moves in, tries to take control. She is faster on her feet – mentally but also physically – than most. She is explosive. She has reasons to be. But she is loyal – she doesn’t know it or admit it, but deeply loyal.
We see the first signs of this in book one. But she comes too close to something that will make her vulnerable – and breaks off all contact with Mikael till the end of the second book. The tentacles of her online research and ability to hack into secret police, criminal and corporate systems, makes her a forerunner of the “wiki-leaks” phenomenon of 2010, in which one Swedish prosecutor attempted to arrest the editor of Wiki-leaks on behalf of the US authorities whose secrets he leaked, and then was overruled by another who swiftly took over her position in the case. This is so close to the intrigues of the Millennium trilogy it raises hairs on the back of one’s neck. She helps reveal state secrets, and autonomous organizations within the security apparatus with their own agenda.
This will become the main action of the socio-political themes in the final book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. She is one of the victims of an autonomous organization created inside the Security Police who need to keep certain state secrets, and feed distorted news to the media. This echo of Dick Cheney’s independent organization within the CIA, which amassed the information fed to Colin Powell for his Iraq war justification speech is too close for comfort. There is a profound and intricately depicted warning in the narrative for all democracies who maintain secret services: they may have offspring that take on a life of their own. Yet Salander and Blomquist through their non-official investigative techniques employing extreme research skills (more than extreme violence) and all post-modern technology, manage to bring them down a reveal a rot in a democracy that reaches back to the Cold War. Still it is the diminutive “girl” – an expansive, with her expansive genius-like mind, who is the heart of these novels. Her hero’s quest, as Joseph Campbell would have put it, gives shape to everything. We may have thought that Blomkvist was Holmes in book one, but by the end we understand he is just a very industrious Watson to the central victim and investigative master, Lisbeth Salander.
By the final chapters of that volume, in an attempt to align with the elusive Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist convenes a meeting of those who know her. Blomkvist, in a rare moment of true levity says: “When this is all over I’m going to found an association called ‘The Knights of the Idiotic Table’ and its purpose will be to arrange an annual dinner where we tell stories about Lisbeth Salander. You’re all members.” I want to be a member, for perhaps the books have made me a sort of idiot, like those who adopt a series of novels as the foundation for a transitory cult (See Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Lawrence Durrell, Jens Bjørneboe in Norway, Paul Auster and others). I feel I became a member of that club without paying dues.
Perhaps the members of the “Salander table” can convene for the third and final film of the trilogy from Sweden this year, before Hollywood puts out what might well be an adrenaline pumping action film version (I hope my fears are unfounded) of the first novel next year. In the end, I think the best thing we can do, however, is read and tell tales of Lisbeth Salander, the outcast, the abused, the renegade, rebel, and the secret spirit of withdrawn generosity – who whose very life till she realizes her full powers, is that of an easy target of blame and abuse for a society that can’t look beyond appearances -- as presented to them by an elite of power-mongers, marketers and liars.
